Google Mobile Search Descriptions To Alert Users If Google Is Being Blocked

Blocking Google mobile from crawling critical files like JavaScript, CSS or images files could prove fatal for your snippets. A message will be displayed instead of the snippet description for mobile search results blocking Googlebot in smart phones. The feature was added to the desktop search in August 2012. Now, this feature is being endowed to the mobile search results.

An example could throw more light on this new feature. A search on modern paintings in Google will show the search results, to be precise the full snippet. But a mobile search with a blocked snippet will display A description for this result is not available because of this sites robots.txt learn more.

The updated webmaster guideline specifies that the crawlers should be allowed access to critical files that your page uses for optimal rendering and indexing. Pierre Far, Googles Webmaster Trends Analyst was quoted as saying Blocking of the files will directly harms how well our [Google] algorithms render and index your content and can result in suboptimal rankings.

To ascertain whether GoogleBot can render your web pages properly, Google created the fetch and render tool within the webmaster tools. Many webmasters block GoogleBot from crawling files like CSS for better ranking. But Google has strictly recommended webmasters to refrain from this practice as it can hurt a websites ranking.

Since the change has been added to the guidelines, the webmasters need to ensure that their mobile sites are not blocking critical files like CSS, JavaScript and image files.