Shopify robots blocking stylesheets causing inconsistent mobile-friendly test results?

[nhhernandez]

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

[zeehj]

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