Shopify robots blocking stylesheets causing inconsistent mobile-friendly test results?
-
One of our shopify sites suffered an extreme rankings drop. Recent Google algorithm updates include mobile first so I tested the site and our team got different mobile-friendly test results. However, search console is also flagging pages as not mobile friendly. So, while us end-users see the site as OK on mobile, this may not be the case for Google?
I researched more about inconsistent mobile test results and found answers that say it may be due to robots.txt blocking stylesheets.
Do you recognise any directory blocked that might be affecting Google's rendering? We can't edit shopify robots.txt unfortunately. Our dev said the only thing that stands out to him is Disallow: /design_theme_id and the rest shouldn't be hindering Google bots.
Here are some of the files blocked:
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /9103034/checkouts
Disallow: /9103034/orders
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /collections/+
Disallow: /collections/%2B
Disallow: /collections/%2b
Disallow: /blogs/+
Disallow: /blogs/%2B
Disallow: /blogs/%2b
Disallow: /design_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_script_id
Disallow: /discount/*
Disallow: /gift_cards/*
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association -
Nikki–if you feel comfortable sharing one of the sites, that would be helpful for further investigation!
It seems like there's a lot you're blocking in your robots.txt that you might need (though that's hard to suss out without knowing your site):
-
Disallow: /blogs/+, Disallow: /blogs/%2B, Disallow: /blogs/%2b
-
assuming /blogs is the primary page path for any other blog content (e.g. /blogs/blog-title-goes-here)
-
Disallow: /design_theme_id
-
assuming this is one of your stylesheets, you should probably remove this.
-
Disallow: /gift_cards/*
-
no idea what comes after /gift_cards/[here], but this may be unnecessary
There may be other reasons Google doesn't reliably see your site as mobile friendly–if you can provide an example site, then we can dig deeper
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should we launch a new site as responsive or mobile.
need advice - we are launching a new responsive website. one team member very vocal that we should launch as mobile. site first then take that away. I think is a waste of time .. thoughts?
Technical SEO | | AJFanter0 -
Robots.txt blocking Addon Domains
I have this site as my primary domain: http://www.libertyresourcedirectory.com/ I don't want to give spiders access to the site at all so I tried to do a simple Disallow: / in the robots.txt. As a test I tried to crawl it with Screaming Frog afterwards and it didn't do anything. (Excellent.) However, there's a problem. In GWT, I got an alert that Google couldn't crawl ANY of my sites because of robots.txt issues. Changing the robots.txt on my primary domain, changed it for ALL my addon domains. (Ex. http://ethanglover.biz/ ) From a directory point of view, this makes sense, from a spider point of view, it doesn't. As a solution, I changed the robots.txt file back and added a robots meta tag to the primary domain. (noindex, nofollow). But this doesn't seem to be having any effect. As I understand it, the robots.txt takes priority. How can I separate all this out to allow domains to have different rules? I've tried uploading a separate robots.txt to the addon domain folders, but it's completely ignored. Even going to ethanglover.biz/robots.txt gave me the primary domain version of the file. (SERIOUSLY! I've tested this 100 times in many ways.) Has anyone experienced this? Am I in the twilight zone? Any known fixes? Thanks. Proof I'm not crazy in attached video. robotstxt_addon_domain.mp4
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
Will Google Also Penalize Desktop Rankings If Your Site is Not Mobile Friendly?
Apologies if this question has already been answered. I was unable to find it. For desktop organic rankings: Will Google take into consideration mobile-readiness as a ranking factor? Thanks in advance for any reply, Kind regards,
Technical SEO | | Eric_Lifescript
Eric Darby1 -
How to test a geo tagged homepage?
The e-commerance system we have has a geo tagged hompage system so you can set up different homepages based on the user country IP. But I want to test what the default homepage is, if the system can not get the user IP, does anyone know of a way to do this? Also does googles bot, not give an IP for this, or is it always an American IP (even if your site is set to a different country)? Thanks
Technical SEO | | PaddyDisplays0 -
Rich Snippets Inconsistent Display
Hi Folks, We implemented Schema mark up on our hotel details page many months ago now (previously we had a different mark up language, but switched to Schema during a complete page re-design). Its been live for plenty of time now and is being picked up in webmaster tools. http://www.asiarooms.com/en/singapore/singapore/175433-orchard_hotel_singapore.html Even before we switched to Schema we had a very inconsistent display of rich snippet data in the search results and this has continued despite the mark up being implemented correctly. For example, a search in Google Singapore for 'Orchard Hotel Singapore' shows the AsiaRooms.com listing without any rich snippets. You can see that the vast majority of our competitors like Agoda, Booking.com always show rich snippet data (search for 'orchard hotel singapore agoda' for example). I have checked the hotel in the rich snippet testing tool and its marked up correctly such that it should feasibly show the review count and the score. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.asiarooms.com%2Fen%2Fsingapore%2Fsingapore%2F175433-orchard_hotel_singapore.html&html= Whilst Agoda and Booking seem to display rich snippet data on literally EVERY hotel, its very inconsistent for AsiaRooms which is extremely frustrating - feels like some kind of punishment or favouritism. Any ideas why this might be the case and anything I could try to resolve it? Thanks, Ben
Technical SEO | | BenRush1 -
No results with Link Analysis
So I have been working with a domain since November last year that still shows no improvement in regards to the link analysis. I am baffled because we have gotten them onto the first page on Google for a few of the keywords we are optimizing. Any help with this is greatly appreciated and I am a noob so definitely open to learning. Thanks in advance to all of you. Domain in question - www.modernportablerefrigeration.com Domain is currently on a shared server if that makes any difference. Cordially, Todd Richard admin@richfinn.org
Technical SEO | | RichFinnSEO0 -
I am trying to block robots from indexing parts of my site..
I have a few websites that I mocked up for clients to check out my work and get a feel for the style I produce but I don't want them indexed as they have lore ipsum place holder text and not really optimized... I am in the process of optimizing them but for the time being I would like to block them. Most of my warnings and errors on my seomoz dashboard are from these sites and I was going to upload the folioing to the robot.txt file but I want to make sure this is correct: User-agent: * Disallow: /salondemo/ Disallow: /salondemo3/ Disallow: /cafedemo/ Disallow: /portfolio1/ Disallow: /portfolio2/ Disallow: /portfolio3/ Disallow: /salondemo2/ is this all i need to do? Thanks Donny
Technical SEO | | Smurkcreative0 -
Using robots.txt to deal with duplicate content
I have 2 sites with duplicate content issues. One is a wordpress blog. The other is a store (Pinnacle Cart). I cannot edit the canonical tag on either site. In this case, should I use robots.txt to eliminate the duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | bhsiao0