About
Poodle
January 16, Poodle predictor v1.0, first public release:
Poodle predictor is a tool that attempts to give you an idea of how your site will show up in the search-engine results, before it's too late, and they have already cached it.
This helps you avoid making mistakes that will either prevent your site from getting a decent listing, or will show a useless description of you site in the search-engine results.
To do this, we have attempted to replicate the rules used by the main search-engines, as they spider your site.
Naturally they are not all identical, and they don't make their search algorithms publicly available, so Poodle predictor's results will never be identical with the search-engines results.
Poodle predictor comprises several different components:
- Poodle predictor's Spider view
- Poodle predictor's Diagnostics view
- Poodle predictor's Source-code view
In the Spider view, you can enter the URL to your site.
The first result resembles what you would see in a search-engine if you searched for your site by URL.
You will see a link to the Diagnostics and Source-code view under it, and a link to toggle the visibility of the Header and Meta-tag section.
Underneath this you see a list of all crawlable links the spider found on the site. The first 10 links have been crawled to give you a simulated search-engine result.
Clicking on any of these links will crawl that site, not go to it.
If you click the Diagnostics view link under the first result, you will see a color-coded representation of what the search spider sees at that URL.
Colors are used to show various elements that are important to search-engines:
Warnings Title alt attributes title attributes
H1, H2 or H3 Headings
If you click the Source-code view link under the first result, you will see a color-coded representation of the HTML source-code of that URL.
This is mainly used to debug a site when it doesn't show as expected in the other views.
To Do:
* This is a first release, and is sure to contain lots of errors, if you find you site doesn't show as expected, and you think it might be caused by an error in Poodle predictor, send a mail to richard.b@gritechnologies.com
* This documentation needs to be extended, to explain the rules used.
* Support for keyword searches, within sites.
* Better support for metatags.
* Support for robot.txt rules.
* Pages should validate xhtml.
* Our own site needs to be made more search-engine friendly, with metatags etc added.
Why is it called Poodle predictor? I couldn't find anything that rhymed with "Yahoo".
January 17, Poodle predictor v1.1:
Got plenty of feedback from users, and a few enhancements were made:
* General bugfixes to do with relative links, and mailto.
* Added support for Google's cached pages.
This can be used to see whether Poodle predictor gives the same result for your page.
If Google already has a cached version of your site, you can enter googles URL to that into the search box.
Idealy Poodle will display the same search result as Google, as it's using the same cached version.
You can then compare Poodles result for your live page, to see how your listing will be changed after your site is cached again.
* Now the last words are no longer cut of.
* Poodle returns approximately the same length of result now (two rows), although this is hard, as the description length is variable.
February 2 Poodle predictor v1.2:
* Small bugfixes that caused a few problems (like on pages with •).
* Added Poodle's Rules and Related Links pages.
February 3 Poodle predictor v1.3:
* Small bugfixes that caused a few problems, like on pages with multiple <title> tags, and a crazy bug that didn't allow any links starting with the letters m,a,i,l,t and o - I guess it looks simple once you know, but it took a while to find :o).
* Added more links to the Related Links pages.
© 2003 GRI Technologies