How to See Hidden Content on a Website?

Introduction

Hidden content is also called dynamic content. This content is hidden when it doesn’t have a link connected to searchable sources. Apart from this, the websites still under construction with many temporary resources can also come into this category.

It basically becomes apparent to you when you issue on a database-driven website. This can be a problem because google search engines are not designed to store or track these databases. For this, you need to find these pages. Then, you need to open the website and search for detailed information.

How to Find Hidden Content?

Sometimes it is necessary for you to find hidden pages, or they contain some beneficial information you cannot find elsewhere. So let us see a few ways to help you find hidden content or pages.

Find Hidden Content Manually

If you are a web owner, you can just check a page for accessibility through manual copy and paste of the URL into the browser. Once you have pasted the URL into the browser and it does not show up, the content is hidden.

You need to organize your site into directories if you don’t know about the pages hidden on your website. Then add your website domain name to your browser and get to the pages. Once you find the hidden pages, you can add them to the site map and request re-indexing.

Use Robots.Txt

Before getting into how robots.txt help you find hidden content let us quickly tell you that you need to understand how the search engine finds hidden content. Why? Keep reading. You will understand why!

The work of the search engine is to crawl through pages and index them so they can be displayed when a search query is made. But sometimes, if the web owner does not want to show the content, he does not index it in the search engine. Instead, they add these page addresses to the file called robots.txt, which is called a root file. That means the content is hidden.

So to find these hidden pages:

• Type your domain name/robots.txt into the browser in the search bar.
• Then replace the domain name with the site address.
• Press Enter.
• The page is inaccessible to search engines if you see the entries with the preface ‘No follow’ or ‘Disallow’.

Hack the Website

You have seen young tech hacking the website quickly and easily in ads or on television many times. You may think it is hard in real life, but fortunately, it is not. So you don’t need to be a young tech genius to hack a website.

Type the address of the website’s specific pages you want to hack into the browser. If you don’t know the proper address, note down the predictive patterns of other pages on the site. You can also use this method for entire folders.

Example.com/content/page1.html. Seeing that ‘content’ is the folder name, you will be able to view the entire folder by typing Example.com/content. This is only if access to the folder hasn’t been disabled.

Conclusion

Finding hidden content in a website is essential to eliminate dead ends. However, sometimes the crucial information on a website can go hidden or invisible that you cannot find elsewhere. This article has mentioned a few methods to help you find hidden content or pages. You can do any of the above hacks depending on your web design.