Google Search Mislabeling Some Pages as Not Mobile Friendly

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

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Google Search Mislabeling Some Pages as Not Mobile Friendly

vegasrick

1:42 am on Sep 16, 2017 (gmt 0)

This problem was a widespread bug back in February, which Google addressed and fixed.

Barry explains my current issue in this article from last December, because he himself saw these problems - [seroundtable.com...]

In the last 2 days, I've noticed several of our articles being tagged with this "non mobile friendly" label. Not a large amount of articles... probably about 1-2 articles per day, out of 30-40 posted articles per day.

2 of the mislabeled articles had the "non mobile friendly" message go away without any intervention on my end.

The few articles in question, I checked them on Google's Mobile Friendly test and fetched them as Google, and everything seems perfect.

Not sure what's going on with the mislabeling issues. Could be a bug, maybe one of my banner ads acting up with the Google Bot. Hard to tell at the moment.

keyplyr

6:30 pm on Sep 16, 2017 (gmt 0)

Interesting... being a "known issue" hopefully should get it resolved, but this is a long time for this to persist.

not2easy

8:47 pm on Sep 16, 2017 (gmt 0)

In GSC, listed under "Search Traffic" you can go to Mobile Usability and see if those pages are listed there. If they are listed there you can use their tools to ask them to check it again. It is one at a time and it does not seem to do anything even if it finds they are Mobile Friendly.

You should pay attention in their testing, to any files listed as "Blocked Resources". I found they were using test results from several months ago to determine Mobile Usability. The files they show as blocked were all accessible, not blocked by robots.txt. I found them listed under Blocked Resources in the Google Index Menu (still in GSC). They were claiming that robots.txt blocked them from crawling some .js and .css files (using a 6 months old robots.txt file). I used "Test Robots.txt" to make sure they were not blocked at all, then hit the "Submit" button to get them to update the antique version of robots.txt.

An aggravating process.