MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google announced this week a new report within Google Webmaster Tools called the Blocked Resources Report that helps online operators discover images, CSS and JavaScript that GoogleBot cannot reach because they are being blocked.
“This report starts with the names of the hosts from which your site is using blocked resources such as JavaScript, CSS, and images,” said Google’s John Mueller. “Clicking on the rows gives you the list of blocked resources and then the pages that embed them, guiding you through the steps to diagnose and resolve how we're able to crawl and index the page's content.
An update to Fetch and Render shows how these blocked resources matter, Mueller said.
“When you request a URL be fetched and rendered, it now shows screenshots rendered both as Googlebot and as a typical user,” he said. “This makes it easier to recognize the issues that significantly influence why your pages are seen differently by Googlebot.
“Webmaster Tools attempts to show you only the hosts that you might have influence over, so at the moment, we won't show hosts that are used by many different sites (such as popular analytics services). Because it can be time-consuming (usually not for technical reasons!) to update all robots.txt files, we recommend starting with the resources that make the most important visual difference when blocked.”
For more information on blocked resources, see Google’s Help Center article.