Google sent out large scale warnings today alarming webmasters that GoogleBot is unable to access the CSS and JavaScript on their sites. Most of these warnings were sent via email using Google Search Console which was earlier among Google Webmaster Tools. The company also pointed out to its mail receivers that this might lead to ‘suboptimal ratings’. This has led to a lot of people who is doing optimization in major search engines getting worried.
Google has been sending repeated requests to not block JS and CSS on websites for years together. In fact, a new ‘fetch and render tool’ will send you a warning if you ever happen to block these. The content of the message is as such:
”
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“
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Instead of panicking, here are some steps which you can take:
- Go through your robots.txt files and see if they contain any of the following codes – Disallow: /.php$*, Disallow: /.inc$*, Disallow: /.css$* or Disallow: /.js$*. If yes, then delete the one that exists since that is the one blocking GoogleBot from accessing the files it has to render.
- Try the ‘Fetch and Render Tool’ and see what instructions are given to fix the problems your site is facing.
- If none of these work then talk to your web developer or someone else who does this job to figure out other solutions.
