I caught this Twitter thread this week and noticed that Google has removed the Google cache links that used to show up with search results.
The Google cache, and especially the text-only version has always been a great tool to me to use when auditing webpages.
It lets you see what Google is seeing on a page.
The text-only version is a great way to make sure all your important text is being picked up by Google and that there is nothing crazy going on with some CSS styling to move things out of the order you want. For example, on a client site I recently found that their sidebar table of contents was showing up at the end of the content instead of the beginning.
While it is still available to us, I thought I would share a bookmarklet that lets you quickly access the text-only version of a webpage from the Google cache.
What is a bookmarklet?
A bookmarklet is a bookmark stored in a web browser that contains JavaScript commands that add new features to the browser.
To create a bookmarklet, simply bookmark a page in your browser. Any page. It does not matter what page. Save it to the bookmarks bar. Now right click on it and select edit. You can change the name of it to whatever you want, and for the URL you are going to paste a script in that field.
Last year I shared a note showing you how to use ChatGPT to build bookmarklets. You can check that post out here.
To access the Google cache of the page you are currently viewing, you would enter this code:
javascript:(function(){var url = encodeURIComponent(location.href);window.open('https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:%27+url);})();If you want to see the text-only version in the Google cache of the page you are on, you would enter this code in setting up your bookmarklet:
javascript:(function(){window.open('http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:'+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+'&strip=1');})()According to that Twitter thread above, at some point this access will be shutdown, but in the meantime make use of this simple shortcut.
