Be Aware – Google Search Ranking can fall down if Google-bot is blocked from CSS and JavaScript

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Not long ago, Google announced a message about updating its technical guidelines for webmasters. Previously, Google was only looking for text-based web content that was accessible via HTTP response body. However, with time web pages with rich content interpreted by JavaScript entered the web world, Google was unable to offer the content to its searches.

In an attempt to rectify the issue, Google went on to render pages by executing JavaScript. It further explains some of its new perspectives that it is no longer rendering text-only browser, but its indexing system has moved on to interpreting modern web browsers.

Here are few pieces of advice from Google:

  • Just like modern browsers, our rendering engine might not support all of the technologies a page uses. Make sure your web design adheres to the principles of progressive enhancement as this helps our systems (and a wider range of browsers) see usable content and basic functionality when certain web design features are not yet supported.
  • Pages that render quickly not only help users get to your content easier but make indexing of those pages more efficient too. We advise you follow the best practices for page performance optimization, specifically:
  • Eliminate unnecessary downloads
  • Optimize the serving of your CSS and JavaScript files by concatenating (merging) your separate CSS and JavaScript files, minifying the concatenated files, and configuring your hosting web server to serve them compressed (usually, gzip compression)
  • Make sure your web hosting server can handle the additional load for serving of JavaScript and CSS files to Googlebot.

Many might have also received messages from Google requesting you to allow access to the key areas and it specified that not allowing it to crawl could harm your search engine rankings. Here is the warning message sent out by Google:

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 sub-optimal rankings.”

It is good if you received this message, as it will let you fix the issue, which not at all a difficult job as it simply requires you to make changes to the robots.txt files. If you want to rank high on search engine, make sure you let Google access CSS and JavaScript files. When you remove restrictions, the search engine master will render smoothly and index your pages efficiently. Besides, to know how Google indexes your web page, you can check out Fetch and Render Google feature in Webmaster tools.

Thus, if you own a business or a tier 4 data center and also want to rank better in search engines then you must adhere to Google advice.  

You need to allow Googlebot access to the CSS, JavaScript and image files used by your web pages so that it could be crawled better to be indexed well.