Google Instant Preview shows old version

[miavamp]

Hi all,

I have a problem with [the home page for one domain].

Google preview is showing the wrong preview, though the cache version is right and the last crawl was on 9th June.

But unfortunately it's still showing the error message from an outtake we had a few weeks ago.

Any ideas why it is still the old preview and how I can change that? I already contacted Google but no response yet.

Thanks, Maria

[edited by: tedster at 10:02 am (utc) on Jun 14, 2012]
[edit reason] please, no personal domains - thanks [/edit]

[tedster]

Hello Maria, and welcome to the forums.

I can tell you that the Preview comes from a different bot than the regular googlebot that builds the cache. Most reports so far have been in the opposite direction - that people can't block the Preview crawl even though they've successfully blocked the regular crawl.

Have you recently made any changes at all to how you block Google's access to your website? That could be i robots.txt or .htaccess or even the robots meta tag for your home page?

[lucy24]

I've noticed an odd phenomenon in logs lately. When a human asks for some rarely-visited page-- I mean, of course, after a g### search-- they will be followed a few seconds afterward by a Preview.

Now, my logs have been known to get hiccupy about exact times, and will often time-travel a second or so in either direction. But this lag is just a tiny bit too long. So it's like g### saying "as long as we're here, let's grab this page for a Preview". And once they've done so, who knows how long they keep that Preview lying around...

[miavamp]

First of all, thanks for your answers.

@Tedster: No, I haven't made any changes recently to robots.txt etc. We don't block the regular crawl for the website. But if another bot is responsible for the preview it makes sense that the preview still shows an old version and not the version in the cache or from the last crawl on 9th June.

So, it really seems that I have to wait until the mysterious preview bot visits the website again. I think that is really frustrating and not really useful...

[g1smd]

After a site redesign and relaunch a few months ago it took Google more than a month to rebuild the new previews. This was a site moving to new URLs for pages, with proper redirects in place from the old URLs.

In particular, to begin with, the previews showed the page text but not the images and this carried on for quite a few weeks after the changeover. The site had several hundred pages.

[lucy24]

But if another bot is responsible for the preview

It isn't a robot. You and I may think it is, because there's no human attached. But Preview doesn't obey robots.txt; it doesn't even read it. I think the Official Reasoning is that previews are generated for humans, who are obviously allowed to visit the page, so Preview is simply showing what they would see. (More accurately: it shows what google would see if it were a human. See assorted threads involving handling of javascript.)