I'm a SEO newbie. I'm looking for a spider simulator that displays what a search engine bot sees. The spider simulators I have found do not work with localhost. Are there tools that do? Thanks.
This will only do one page at a time but maybe it will work for you... The best way to see what the Googlebot sees is to go to the source. You need to sign up for and log into a Google Webmaster Tools account (http://www.google.com/webmasters/). Once logged in click on your site, go to the left column and select Health, then click Fetch as Google. When the fetched page shows up in the list click the link marked Success and it will show you the page as the Googlebot saw it.
Google say to try this on their webmster page here http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2007/11/spiders-view-of-web-20.html> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)