A) Continuing from another thread:
Google sez:
This change added a replacement snippet that explains that there's no description available because of robots.txt
I said:
Has anyone picked up any information-- it would have to be anecdotal at this point-- about how-or-whether this phrase affects ordinary human searchers?
g1smd said:
Human nature being what it is, I'd expect a number of clicks from people wondering what's on the 'uber-sekrit' page.
B) Also much discussed:
What effect does it have on the ordinary human searcher when they ask for a Preview and instead get the mournful box that says "No preview is available"?
Does anyone know? For a while I blocked Preview because it annoyed me and didn't seem to do any good. Then I unblocked it because it generally didn't do any harm-- and I wondered if its unavailability might
itself be harmful. That is, seeing a Preview might not make people more likely to visit the site. But being
unable to see it might make them
less likely to visit.
Aside: Lately I've been getting a lot of Bing previews. Whole new category. There's a weird follow-up where they come back an hour or two later and pick up a fresh copy of the stylesheet, as if they were previewing all over again. But requests for a preview can't possibly
always come in pairs.
Question: Do searchers get the Preview option if the page snippet is roboted-out? I tried to pull up an example on my own site, but g### refused to disgorge any "no description available" results. And naturally I can't remember any of my real-life searches that brought up the phrase :(
