Google Previews Added To Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors

Jul 17, 2012 - 8:32 am 6 by

Google Webmaster ToolsIf you login to Google Webmaster Tools, then go to the crawl errors reports and place your mouse over one of the URLs listed in the report, a overlay will pop up with a preview.

This seems to be a new feature that I didn't notice being announced by Google yet. It seems to work best with soft 404s because often, real 404s do not have any real landing page (although they should).

Here is a screen shot:

Google Previews Added To Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors

Last week, Google added alerts for crawl errors but made no mention of this feature. Google is, however, constantly tweaking Google features on Google Webmaster Tools.

A WebmasterWorld thread is having discussion around this now. A user said:

Mouseover of each URL makes an immediate call to the site from IP 74.125.nnn.nnn with same or different IPs for each request, using user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/536.8 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Chrome/19.0.1084.36 Safari/536.8.

The referrer is http://www.google.com/search each time.

Would this be useful for you? Maybe if Google showed you the specific part of the page with the error but with 404s, I am not sure if it makes sense?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: These preview links are now on all links within the tool.

 

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