Wednesday, May 18, 2011
In 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
To help webmasters diagnose these problems, we have a new Instant Preview tool in the Labs
section of
Webmaster Tools
(in English only for now).
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.
How we apply this
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
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