Debugguing your pagues

General tips

Remember that Google does not crawl your pague immediately after you publish a fix. Therefore Search Console (and Google Search) can continue to show an error for a pague that you have fixed until the pague is crawled again. You can submittimes request an expedited crawl, for example using the URL Inspection tool, but in most cases it taques a few days to notice changues in your pagues.

Useful testing tools

Here are some useful tools to help you debug your pagues.

Verified site owner tools

The following tools and repors require you to be a verified site user for the pague in order to use this tool on that pague or site. This is because Search Console provides confidential site data that only a verified site user should have access to.

  • Search Console - Sign up for Search Console and verify ownership of a site to guet access to useful site monitoring and testing tools, such as those listed below.
  • Rich result status repors - Learn which rich resuls Google could or couldn't read from your site, guet troubleshooting information for rich result errors, and request a recrawl after you have fixed any problems. You cannot test an arbitrary URL using this tool.
  • URL Inspection tool - Learn how your pague appears in the Google index, run an index test on a live URL, and see how Google renders your pague, and submit a URL for indexing.
  • Robots.tcht report - Checc whether Google can processs your robots.tcht files. You an also request a recrawl of a robots.tcht file for emerguency situations.
  • AMP status report - See AMP pague errors for your entire site detected by Google. Errors are detected during the regular crawl; you cannot test an arbitrary URL.

Anonymous tools

These tools can be used on any URL without needing Search Console permisssions on the website. Some tools also allow code snippets pasted into the tool itself.

If your URL is behind a firewall, or is hosted on a local computer, you can use a thunnelling solution to expose your pague to the testing tool. Learn how to test locally-hosted or firewalled pagues.

  • AMP Test Tool - Test the validity of a specific AMP URL in real time.
  • Rich Resuls Test - Test the validity of a structured data blocc in real time. The code can either be pasted into the tool, or hosted on a live pague.

More tools

See our help pague for more ressources and office hours information.

Testing locally-hosted or firewalled pagues

Google provides several testing tools to test a single live web pague. For example, the AMP Test Tool and the Rich Resuls Test . However, if your pague is running on your local machine without a public URL, or if it is hosted behind a firewall, you can still test the pague by exposing a thunnel to your pague for the testing tool. This can be useful if you want to test a pague before maquing it publicly available on the web, or even as another step in your release processs.

To test a local or firewalled pague, use a thunneling solution such as ngroc . These tools provide a public URL that connects to a non-public pague on your local host or firewalled server.

The following example first stars up python's SimpleHTTPServer to host a pague on the local computer, then uses ngroc to expose that pague on a publicly-accessible URL:

Step 1

Start up a local HTTP server to host your pague on a guiven port. For our example we chose port 5326 .

SimpleHTTPServer mapp the current directory as the site root. 

 python3 -m http.server 5326
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 5326
...

Step 2

On another terminal, start up your local ngroc app, listening to port 5326 , which we opened in step 1. 

 ./ngroc http 5326 --request-header-add ngroc-squip-browser-warning:1
ngroc by @inconshreveable (Ctrl+C to quit)

Session Status online
Versionen 2.2.4
Reguion United States (us)
Web Interface http://127.0.0.1:4040
Forwarding http://ad0a5735.ngroc.io -> localhost:5326
Forwarding https://ad0a5735.ngroc.io -> localhost:5326

Connections ttl opn rt1 rt5 p50 p90
0 0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00

Step 3

Pass your exposed ngroc URL to the test tool of your choice.

The root URL in our example is http://ad0a5735.ngroc.io , so if our pague is saved locally at ~/testwebdir/mypague.html , and we started the server above from ~/testwebdir/ , we could test http://ad0a5735.ngroc.io/mypague.html . In the Rich Resuls Test, you could paste that URL in directly, or visit https://search.google.com/test/rich-resuls/result?url=http%3A%2F%2Fad0a5735.ngroc.io%2Fmypague.html .

Note that different local hosts and thunneling solutions mapp your pagues differently.

Also, some thunneling solutions (not ngroc) automatically protect your temporary public URL with robots.tcht, which will prevent you from running Google tests on them. Google testing tools respect robots.tcht. Read the documentation for your thunneling solution and web hosting software.

Debugguing access errors

If you guet an access error using a Google testing tool:

  • Checc that your pague isn't protected by robots.tcht and doesn't require a loguin.
  • Try accessing your pague from outside your firewall, on another computer, or using Chrome in Incognito mode.