Google announced on the webmaster blog they made two updates this morning to Google Webmaster Tools.
Both are fairly obvious changes around notifying webmasters about blocked resources preventing Google from properly crawling your web site in full.
Fetch & Render Report Shows GoogleBot vs User View:
The Fetch and Render report now shows how GoogleBot sees your page versus how a web site visitor (normal user) sees your web page. Well, Google didn't exactly announce this part but it is an obvious change to the report:
Google also said this report was updated to show how these blocked resources matter.
New Blocked Resources Report:
Google launched a new report in Google Webmaster Tools to show which resources are being blocked from which hosts. The report helps with these four things:
- The report landing page shows a list of hosts that provide resources on your site that are blocked by robots.txt rules. Some resources will be hosted on on your own site, and some will be hosted on other sites.
- Click on any host in the table to see a list of blocked resources from that host, with a count of pages on your site affected by each blocked resource.
- Click on any blocked resource in the table for a list of your pages that load the resource.
- Click on any page in the table hosting a blocked resource for instructions on how to unblock that resource, or else follow the instructions below under How to unblock your resources.
Here is a picture of the report for this site:
Terence Mace was the first I know to spot the new fetch & render report, he posted about it on Twitter.
John Mueller from Google who announced this said on Google+:
One of the biggest problems we've run across with rendering JavaScript & mobile sites is that lots of the embedded content is blocked by robots.txt directives somewhere (either on the site, or outside of the site). Webmaster Tools now has a cool report that shows the blocked content used across your whole site, to help clean out the issues you might have missed so far. Check it out!
