Editors note: Learn more about measuring the success of your site at Future of Web Apps Miami – February 22nd – 24th 2010. Buy your ticket now.

Ryan pointed out a nice little feature of Google Webmaster Tools recently and I thought it worth sharing.

Hidden away under the labs tab is a feature called “Fetch as Googlebot”. With “Fetch as Googlebot” you are able to see exactly how a page appears to Google when it’s crawled. Here’s the results for carsonified.com/blog. Click the image below to see it full size.

Why is this useful?

• It allows you to troubleshoot a page’s poor performance in search results. For example it will identify content that can’t be crawled by Google.
• It can help identify if your site has been hacked with malicious and undesired content
• It identifies he HTTP response returned by your server
• It highlights the HTML code as seen by Google. Useful if you use a lot of generated content in the page.

Other useful tools

As well as “Fetch as Googlebot” Webmaster Tools has a number of useful options including:

• Sitemap submission
• Facility to edit your sitelinks (links that appear beneath the pages search result in Google)
• Help with reindexing your site if you move it to a new domain
• Top search queries, keywords and subscriber stats
• Help with robots.txt files
• Crawler stats

You can find more out about Webmaster Tools on the Google web site.