Friday 31 July 2015

New Google Warning: GoogleBot Cannot Access CSS & JS

Google is now sending out a rush of new warnings via Google Search Console, formerly Google Webmaster Tools to notify webmasters that GoogleBot cannot access their CSS and JS (JavaScript) files on their web sites.

Don’t be alarmed if you received a warning from Google in your email today — many webmasters were alerted that “Googlebot cannot access your JavaScript and/or CSS files.”

Google sent out this warning via Search Console, while also reminding them that Googlebot’s inability to access those files may result in “suboptimal rankings”.
That sounds bad, but the good news is there’s an easy fix for it and implementing the fix end up helping your site.

Tons of webmasters are concerned after receiving these warnings.

Here is a picture:

Google has been telling webmasters to not block CSS & JavaScript for years and years. Here is Matt Cutts in 2012 telling webmasters not to block it. The webmaster guidelines were updated to say not to block them. The new fetch and render tool warns you when you block CSS and JavaScript. We also know, Google renders the page as a user would see it these days, so blocking CSS/JS can impact that big time.

It seems like Google is sending these notices out in mass quantity now. The message reads:

“Google systems have recently detected an issue with your homepage that affects how well our algorithms render and index your content. Specifically, Googlebot cannot access your JavaScript and/or CSS files because of restrictions in your robots.txt file. These files help Google understand that your website works properly so blocking access to these assets can result in suboptimal rankings.”

This is not a penalty notification, but a warning that if Google cannot see your whole site, it may result in poorer rankings.

If you get this message, you may consult with a trusted SEO services company. Also you can use the fetch and render tool to diagnosis the issue deeper as well.

How To Quickly Unblock JavaScript & CSS Assets

Gary Illyes from Google posted on Stack Overflow the cheat, or quick way, of unblocking your JavaScript and CSS files from Google. Gary said the "simplest form of allow rule to allow crawling javascript and css resources" is to add this to your robots.txt file:

User-Agent: Googlebot
Allow: .js
Allow: .css

Gary said this will open it all up for GoogleBot.

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