Is my text readable? I don't see it in the page source

[theLotter]

Text on my site seems to be readable in a text only version (the page is not cached so I viewed it by disabling JAVA and then copy and pasted the page into Word)

However, when I look in the page source I don't see the text there.

The text was created using Open X html boxes to help us with formatting, but is this causing an SEO problem?

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

If you can see it with javascript turned off then it should be readable by the search engines. I am not familiar with open x boxes, care to give a url so we can have a quick look?

[grasshopper]

Hi Sara,

The best way to check what Googlebot is seeing is by going into your Google Webmaster Tools account, and clicking

Health >>Fetch as Googlebot.

Paste your URL in, and then click on whatever appears in the "Fetch Status" column, which will likely be "Success".  You can then see the code that Googlebot is reading, which should be your page source code.

If you don't have GWT set up yet, you can accomplish pretty much the same thing with publicly available spider simulators like this one: http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php

Hope that helps!

[Chris.Menke]

If this is happening throughout your site and your site is more than a few months old and has some  links to it, I'd be skeptical as to whether the content (or even the urls) are being indexed--especially considering that you have to turn off your JS to view the source. Remember, the bot is like a stripped stripped down browser and can't all of the code your browser can.  How old is your site and is any of it being indexed?

Also, do you have some sort of plugin installed to deter content from being duplicated from your site? I've seen that show the same symptoms as what you're describing.

[theLotter]

It's a new site and I have now confirmed it's not readable

Not the answer I was looking for, but thanks for all the help!

[AlanMosley]

Could well be, try viewing as googlebot or bingbot in wmt