Google: Don't Worry If Your Google Webmaster Tools Preview Is Wrong

You know that often, Google Webmaster Tools shows an image preview of your site's home page on the dashboard listing view of your site profiles within Google Webmaster Tools.

What if the image of your site is wrong? Should you be concerned? Google's John Mueller implies it is really not something to be too concerned about.

In a Google Webmaster Help thread, one person was concerned because his mobile site was displayed in the preview and not his main site. John said, don't "give too much weight to these preview images."

I wouldn't give too much weight to these preview images -- they're not meant to be a representation of how Googlebot crawls the page. If you do see something wrong there, I'd still follow up to see where it came from, but it's not something that would be affecting how we index & rank your website. From what I can tell here, we do recognize your website appropriately, and can pick up the smartphone version. Since the homepage has a very different response size depending on the version that you serve, one way to dig into the details could be to check your server logs, comparing size with the user-agent that made the request, to double-check that your real users get the correct version.

These previews don't represent what Googlebot crawls or your indexing and ranking. It is likely just a style thing for Webmaster Tools.

Local SEO Checklist

WebmasterWorld moderator, travelin cat, posted an awesome and free local SEO cheat sheet onWebmasterWorld.

He said he has uses this cheat sheet for "some time" and if you take it step by step in a careful and detailed manner, "this information should work for you as well."

Here are the instructions but for the cheat sheet, go toWebmasterWorld.

First, complete the following questionnaire BEFORE you begin to submit your website to the search engines, review websites and other citation sites. Some of these questions may not apply to your business, if that is the case, just leave them blank.

Be accurate and thorough. The most important thing to remember is to BE CONSISTENT! All of your submissions must have identical information or you will not get the search engine rankings that you will need to improve business.

After you have completed this questionnaire, use it and the information that it asked you to gather up, to submit to the 25 sites included below it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.