Google Roll Out Mass of ‘Cannot Access CSS and JS’ Notices
With the announcement that Google had finally begun their rollout of the latest version of Google Panda (4.2) we knew that as soon as they noted that the changes would take ‘a couple of months' to completely take effect, this was never going to be a notice free roll out for many and it seems that our thoughts were correct as webmasters take to the online community to share tales of receiving notice that Google can't access everything that they would like to on your website.
The latest string of warning notices delivered in Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console) centre around Google telling site owners that they are failing to be able to completely access Javascript and CSS elements within a site, which could cause them to be unable to see valuable aspects of your website.
As with every warning notice that any website owner receives from the search engine giants, panic was seen to have broken out as site owners rushed to check their robots.txt permissions on their sites to try to get to the bottom of their problem however with many claiming that they aren’t seeing blocks that would relate to the issue, they are beginning to believe that there could have been a mistake in the fact that they received the notice, but listen up, we may be able to shed some light on that for you.
A look at the ‘Google cannot access CSS and JS files' messages that website owners are waking up to shows that Google consider this to be ‘an issue' and the terminology does seem to offer a fear factor for those that are unsure towards what could be causing Google to have to reach out to the owner, however if you have received one of the notices, you aren't alone.
One thing that you should note about this notice is that Google does not deem this ‘an issue' that would require a ranking penalisation or dampening as you would see from triggering something like the metrics that the Google Panda algorithm is designed to detect, instead they are simply saying that they have a reduced understanding of your website and that in turn could potentially mean that your site would not rank as competitively as it should, in theory. It should be pointed out that opening up your CSS and JS files would not mean that you would be given a boost in the search engine results.
Website owners that have received these notices are advised that they should be looking to make use of the Google Fetch and Render tool found within your Search Console (Webmaster Tools) platform and should be looking to ensure that what Google sees from the image rendered is the same as what is being shown to the user and to check your robots.txt file for the potential block that could be in place.
Got A Notice and Struggling to Figure Out Why?
It seems that there are a number of instances where these notifications are being sent out to website owners that have rushed to check their robots.txt file to see if they have anything in there that could resemble this:
After not being able to see either this or similar within their robots.txt file they are reaching out for help in trying to identify what the source of the problem could be and it seems that it could be something a little less obvious, especially if you are not completely informed to what your content management system (CMS) is doing.
A prime example of this, and what looks like it could be the reason that Google's claim that these notices have impacted just over 18% of websites, is that the popular WordPress CMS blocks a file within it entitled ‘wp-includes', which could host a number of CSS/JS files, and although blocked the site still makes use of these throughout your website.
This is a common practise with CMS based platforms and the likelihood is that if you aren’t specifically blocking Javascript or CSS files/folders in your robots.txt, your include files are most likely to be the cause of what Google are reporting to you as they are widely blocked as standard.
2 Comments
A.B.
Hi,
Serving blocked CSS / JS above the fold is not related only to robots.txt. More than 90% of the WordPress sites have tons of resources blocked above the fold. This is a serious issue and we should all take action as Google wants their bot to render the page even better. We are at the new age where the rankings and understanding of sites take more and more data from an UI/UX point of view. People can test their sites and see if they have the same issue trough PageSpeed Insights. Please do not oversimplify things by telling people it is only about robots.txt as all technically aware people know what blocked resources served above the fold means.
Kind Regards
Alex Graves
Hi A.B,
Thanks for your comment and you are right, there are wide spread issues and the article does simplify matters somewhat however that is due to the fact that due to the knowledge differential of the readers of Dave’s site, for us to provide support for the more technically enhanced readers would be basically trying to teach them what they would already know.
There will be readers of the post that will fail to know that CSS/JS files can be found within the variations of folders that certain CMS platforms contain, however the example shown within the article is more focused towards the WordPress platform as it possesses a large share of the blogging marketshare, with company and eCommerce sites also slowly emerging strong within their use outside of the likes of Magento etc.
We do aim to offer a resource in which a variety of readers are still able to take away specifics from the news and insight that we cover on the site and for those with a more technical knowledge they would have a starting point in which to look into, knowing that there would be further issues in which they could explore, where as a parental blogger that just likes to share her daily routine would need something to go on so that they can find a starting point for their search to correct the issue.
We have already seen websites claim that they aren’t blocking items within their robots.txt but when looking into the CMS found that the files that triggered it were within additional sub folders that have no need to be rendered or seen by Google.