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Debugging your pages

General tips

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

Useful testing tools

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

Verified site owner tools

The following tools and reports require you to be a verified site user for the page in order to use this tool on that page 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 get access to useful site monitoring and testing tools, such as those listed below.
Rich result status reports - Learn which rich results Google could or couldn't read from your site, get 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 page appears in the Google index, run an index test on a live URL, and see how Google renders your page, and submit a URL for indexing.
Robots.txt report - Check whether Google can process your robots.txt files. You an also request a recrawl of a robots.txt file for emergency situations.
AMP status report - See AMP page 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 permissions 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 tunnelling solution to expose your page to the testing tool. Learn how to test locally-hosted or firewalled pages.

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

More tools

See our help page for more resources and office hours information.

Testing locally-hosted or firewalled pages

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

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

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

Step 1

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

SimpleHTTPServer maps 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 ngrok app, listening to port 5326, which we opened in step 1.

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

Session Status online
Version 2.2.4
Region United States (us)
Web Interface http://127.0.0.1:4040
Forwarding http://ad0a5735.ngrok.io -> localhost:5326
Forwarding https://ad0a5735.ngrok.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 ngrok URL to the test tool of your choice.

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

Note that different local hosts and tunneling solutions map your pages differently.

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

Debugging access errors

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

Check that your page isn't protected by robots.txt and doesn't require a login.
Try accessing your page from outside your firewall, on another computer, or using Chrome in Incognito mode.