WMT Placeholder Thumbs Indicator Of Issues?

[Simsi]

Logged into WMT tonight and was looking at my list of 17 sites. The WMT dashboard now shows a thumbshot of each site and the text alongside each says "Nothing To Report".

Two of those sites have given me headaches - have never been able to get them ranking in Google for any decent terms. One site has been online for 5 years or so, the other 2.5. They have never realised their potential although they get a little longtail traffic.

What is interesting is that all my sites show a WMT thumbnail - except for those two. Any thoughts as to why that might be? Seems more than just coincidence IMO.

[g1smd]

I'd say that was an indication of a serious issue of some sort.

Check the obvious stuff: robots.txt, meta robots noindex, returned HTTP status codes.

Run a few pages through the W3C HTML validator to see if the HTML code contains thousands of errors or looks relatively clean.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I had something similar happen, the probelem ended up being a template with improperly nested tags that on some browsers displayed the entire page content on a single line. You couldn't read a thing and previews didn't work.

Of course I never saw it in firefox or IE but when previewing as googlebot via proxy with cookies and cache cleared... sure enough.

[Simsi]

Thanks guys. Gonna run through the HTML markup in some detail. Sounds like that could be the issue.