Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 1:21 PM
Webmaster level: AllIn November, we launched Instant Previews to help users better understand if a particular result was relevant for a their search query. Since launch, our Instant Previews team has been keeping an eye on common complaints and problems related to how pages are rendered for Instant Previews.
When we see issues with preview images, they are frequently due to:
- Blocked resources due to a robots.txt entry
- Cloaking: Erroneous content being served to the Googlebot user-agent
- Poor alternative content when Flash is unavailable
Here, you can input the URL of any page on your site. We will then fetch the page from your site and try to render it both as it would display in Chrome and through our Instant Preview renderer. Please keep in mind that both of these renders are done using a recent build of Webkit which does not include plugins such as Flash or Silverlight, so it's important to consider the value of providing alternative content for these situations. Alternative content can be helpful to search engines, and visitors to your site without the plugin would benefit as well.
Below the renders, you’ll also see automated feedback on problems our system can detect such as missing or roboted resources. And, in the future, we plan to add more informative and timely feedback to help improve your Instant Previews!
Please direct your questions and feedback to the Webmaster Forum.
36 comments:
I just did try this new feature, and I must say my site in Instant Preview in the search looks a lot different than in the "Instant Preview" section of the webmaster tools... Is that supposed to be so?
I have several issues for "roboted", and "fetch failure" on images. What is roboted? And I have no idea why the images are getting fetch-failures. Could this be a problem with the fetch tool?
http://www.jobisez.com/edi/tp/guide.aspx?doc=/edi-igs/AAFES/810_4030.pdf
Web-preview is generated with both a Googlebot user agent and another = Google Web Preview. For previews generated with the Google Web Preview, I do not see how you can suggest 'cloaking' as cloaking refers to " Serving different content to search engines than to users." Google Web Preview is not a 'search engine' bot. It is a user function and it is because it is a user initiated function it does not read or respect robots.txt.
Same thing here Julia.
Any explanation on the meaning of "roboted", "fetch failure", or any that could appear?
What about https: pages? No way to change this it seems.
Hi
I lost all my pagerank some month ago, I do not really know why so I am not sure how to correct it. How can I find out what I did wrong? Thank you for a great blog!
Smultron, Hawaii Kawaii
http://www.hawaiikawaii.net/
my previews are similar to the original page but any explanation on the meaning of "roboted", "fetch failure", or any that could appear?
Have the same thing - "roboted" and "Fetch failure", but Instant Preview looks normal. Is that normal?
Here's my take on this. From what I see in my stats I often see a Googlebot hit paired up with a Google Preview user agent hit. So probably Goglebot "tells" the other fellow what's what including what is blocked for robots.
But for something where there's no robots block at all, the Preview tool in Webmaster Tools seems to have issues with fetching all the bits that make up a page, and it's sort of random as to what will fail and when, like when it takes the snapshot. Probably it times out after 1 or 2 seconds.
I have checked this feature in webmaster tools for my site and I found that my site's look not display properly then immediately I check in live google search and I found that my site's instant preview looks perfect.
My site URL - www.ydeveloper.com
Can you please help me on this?
Hello all
Thank you for all the reports about the fetch failure issues. We're looking into them.
Pierre
Please!!!! I want to see the Instant Preview **tool** in the Labs section of Webmaster Tools, but Google redirects me EVER to the spanish version, were it isn't this tool!
I am assuming that the difference in the tool's preview and of the SERPs preview is that the SERPs is an older version of the page taken from the Google's cache and the Webmaster Tools version of the page is a fresh version of the page.
Which if you have made changes that are not indexed/cached by Google's GoogleBot yet would make sense as to why the two different.
Hi,
I have just checked my webmaster tool for instant preview and wonder why it is showing page not found for all my pages in both Site & instant Preview section. Is anyone else facing the same issue.
Thanks
I'm getting roboted CSS, JS and image files. This results in the instant preview not displaying properly in terms of menu styling and background images. Will this affect my rankings?
Saw the Labs Instant Preview section today and given we are always interested in how Google can help us etc., this one left us mystified... it generated one Fetch error with this address:
http:www.google-analytics.com/ga.js
Thanks for the article.
I have the same issue as what eCommerce Expert said. When I do a search for my site in Google, the "Preview Image" is perfectly fine, yet in the "Instant Preview" tool shows my two images are different.
It would also be helpful to know what "Roboted" & "Fetch Failure" exactly mean.
Thanks :).
explanation is very helpful, because I don't know much about optimizing the site with the webmaster, I have much to learn from you, thank you.
Looks like the actual preview tool has no problems with css and js being robots.txt'ed out, but the GWT labs preview does.
help me to improve SEO on my site
dainangi.blogspot.com
Webmaster is very good tool to manage website and if it includes troubleshooting it will be very nice.
hi,i have website http://desktophelp.in/forums/index.php,iwant to know the usages of Google Webmaster.I have already downloaded the file Webmaster Tools but no so much effect. Please let me know in more details.
It is a great idea, when for instance Google is indexing my sites awesome for a week ago, and I use this tool many times in one day. Is it some trouble yet ?
Same issue regarding fetch failure and roboted. Why no one from replies about the same?
Getting 'Fetch Failure' from images from CSS. Wordpress template site. Is this a common error?
When I use this feature there are a lot of discrepancies between the two versions of our site.
Additionally the preview in the SERP used to be correct before, but is now matching the misrendered Pre-render Preview.
Also the amount of reported problems seems random everytime I perform a test.
http://www.netq-enquete.nl
When i check my website in the labs instant preview it gives correct image but when i do a search on google it gives a broken image.
I have been looking for this over a month now but cant get what is happening.
Would apreciate if any one can help.
In Google Webmastertools there's a place where you can test the Instant Preview function.
The list of user-generated Instant Previews currently shows only the URL, status and date.
For each access attempt where the status is "Success" it would be useful to see an extra column with the number of fetch failures noted.
Where the status is "Error" there's no need to report the number of fetch failures.
Same problem here - in search and webmaster lab.
Some months ago we removed the flash from our header/masthead hoping to get a proper page preview in search and lab results. We still only receive a text formatted rendition of the page. In checking with Labs section of webmaster we show 31 fetch errors including Google Analytics JS code, Add This sharing tool JS, photo display menu utility JS code and a host of other Roboted graphic files.
Any qualified advice or guidance would be greatly appreciated on this. Jim at IslandRealEstate.com
Same problem with my new designed website www.alyshaan.com - it was fine with the previous design.
How can i remove the URL submitted for instant preview or it will be automatically removed??
Using this tool my site looks ok but if you look in google normally its the preview picture and text are both wrong - any ideas?
www.hollybarndogtraining.com
I just finished my mobile site and placed mobile detection script to my original site. However, when doing page preview, I can see under "Mobile Search Instant Preview" the original full site, not the mobile site redirect. Also when going to fetch as googlebot I can see original site content, however in the headers I can see: Location: mobile.site.url
Is this correct?
The reason I'm asking is since I did this redirect I lost about 70% of traffic and google stopped showing most of my pages.
What did I do wrong?
I made an error on the main page of my site.
Of course, I did so at the exact time my instant preview was generated by Google. So for 3 weeks now, I have a instant preview of an incorrect page with busted CSS - despite rectifying the problem.
How do I request an updated preview?
It does not look like anyone is answering these but when you are desperate you will try anything almost.
I have a page on my site whose instant preview is all messed up. It shows a go daddy page?
My URL is:
http://www.captivatingcappadocia.com/istanbul-to-cappadocia/
How do I get google to fix it?
thank you
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