How To Quickly Unblock Google From CSS & JavaScript, What Google Looks At & Number Notified

Yesterday, Google sent mass notifications for blocked JavaScript and CSS. I recommend you read that story if you haven't yet.

Since then, there have been many questions about what to do. I recommended yesterday to unblock your CSS and JavaScript files, use the Fetch and Render tool to check those issues and check the email you received from Google for more details.

But Google is sharing more information now.

How To Quickly Unblock JavaScript & CSS Assets

Gary Illyes from Google posted on Stack Overflow the cheat, or quick way, of unblocking your JavaScript and CSS files from Google. Gary said the "simplest form of allow rule to allow crawling javascript and css resources" is to add this to your robots.txt file:

User-Agent: Googlebot
Allow: .js

Allow: .css

Gary said this will open it all up for GoogleBot.

Google Checks Your Home Page & Mobile View

Primarily when Google checks for blocked CSS and JavaScript assets, they don't go too deep into your site. They look mostly at just your home page and then the mobile/smartphone view of your web site.

John Mueller of Google said this in a comment on his own post on Google+ saying "'re primarily looking at the site's homepage & for the smartphone view of the page."

Google Doesn't Look At 3rd Party Embeds

John Mueller of Google also said there that you shouldn't get this notification from Google if it is a third party embed (ad code, social embeds, etc) that has blocked JS or CSS. You will see these warnings in Google Search Console, but you should not have received an email from Google for 3rd party issues.

John wrote in that Google+ post:

We're looking for local, embedded, blocked JS & CSS. So it would be for URLs that you can "allow" in your robots.txt, not something on other people's sites (though blocked content on other sites can cause problems too, eg, if you're using a JS framework that's hosted on a blocked URL).

How Many Webmasters Received This Notification?

I asked Gary Illyes from Google about how many people received this notification. I didn't think he would answer, but he did shed some light on it.

He said on Twitter that Google sent out 18.7% of what they sent out for the mobile usability issues. So you thought this JS and CSS notification was sent out to a ton of people? The mobile usability notification was sent out to almost 85% more webmasters.

Google Panda 4.2 Is Here; Slowly Rolling Out After Waiting Almost 10 Months

Google says a Panda refresh began this weekend, but will take months to fully roll out.

Google tells Search Engine Land that it pushed out a Google Panda refresh this weekend.

Many of you may not have noticed because this roll out is happening incredibly slowly. Google says the update can take months to fully roll out because it will slowly impact your site. The Panda algorithm is still a site-wide algorithm, but some of your web pages might not see a change immediately.

The last time we had an official Panda refresh was almost 10 months ago: Panda 4.1 happened on September 25, 2014. That was the 28th update, but I would coin this the 29th or 30th update, since we saw small fluctuations in October 2014.

As far as I know, very few webmasters noticed a Google update this weekend. That is how it should be since this Panda refresh is rolling out very slowly.

Google said this impacted about 2-3% of English language queries.

New Chance For Some; New Penalty For Others

The rollout means anyone who was penalized by Panda in the last update has a chance to emerge if they made the right changes. So if you were hit by Panda, you unfortunately won’t notice the full impact immediately but you should see changes in your organic rankings gradually over time.

This is not how many of the past Panda updates rolled out, where typically you’d see a significant increase or decline in your Google traffic more quickly.

For the record, here’s the list of confirmed Panda Updates, with some of the major changes called out with their AKA (also known as) names:

1. Panda Update 1, AKA Panda 1.0, Feb. 24, 2011 (11.8% of queries; announced; English in US only)
2. Panda Update 2, AKA Panda 2.0, April 11, 2011 (2% of queries; announced; rolled out in English internationally)
3. Panda Update 3, May 10, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
4. Panda Update 4, June 16, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
5. Panda Update 5, July 23, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
6. Panda Update 6, Aug. 12, 2011 (6-9% of queries in many non-English languages; announced)
7. Panda Update 7, Sept. 28, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
8. Panda Update 8 AKA Panda 3.0, Oct. 19, 2011 (about 2% of queries; belatedly confirmed)
9. Panda Update 9, Nov. 18, 2011: (less than 1% of queries; announced)
10. Panda Update 10, Jan. 18, 2012 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
11. Panda Update 11, Feb. 27, 2012 (no change given; announced)
12. Panda Update 12, March 23, 2012 (about 1.6% of queries impacted; announced)
13. Panda Update 13, April 19, 2012 (no change given; belatedly revealed)
14. Panda Update 14, April 27, 2012: (no change given; confirmed; first update within days of another)
15. Panda Update 15, June 9, 2012: (1% of queries; belatedly announced)
16. Panda Update 16, June 25, 2012: (about 1% of queries; announced)
17. Panda Update 17, July 24, 2012:(about 1% of queries; announced)
18. Panda Update 18, Aug. 20, 2012: (about 1% of queries; belatedly announced)
19. Panda Update 19, Sept. 18, 2012: (less than 0.7% of queries; announced)
20. Panda Update 20 , Sept. 27, 2012 (2.4% English queries, impacted, belatedly announced
21. Panda Update 21, Nov. 5, 2012 (1.1% of English-language queries in US; 0.4% worldwide; confirmed, not announced)
22. Panda Update 22, Nov. 21, 2012 (0.8% of English queries were affected; confirmed, not announced)
23. Panda Update 23, Dec. 21, 2012 (1.3% of English queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
24. Panda Update 24, Jan. 22, 2013 (1.2% of English queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
25. Panda Update 25, March 15, 2013 (confirmed as coming; not confirmed as having happened)
26. Panda Update 26, July 18, 2013 (confirmed, announced)
27. Panda Update 27 AKA Panda 4.0, May 20, 2014 (7.5% of English queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
28. Panda Update 28 AKA Panda 4.1, Sept. 25, 2014 (3-5% of queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
29. Panda Update 30 AKA Panda 4.2, July 18, 2015 (2-3% of queries were affected; confirmed, announced)

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Google Crawl Limit Per Page: 10 Megabytes

Google's John Mueller said in a Google Hangout this morning on Google+ at the 31:25 mark that Google will crawl up to about 10 megabytes per page.

So if you have pages larger than 10 megabytes, make sure the content on the page is crawled within the 10 megabytes part.

Note, this number of how much Google crawls on a megabyte level with Google seems to continue to rise and rise over time.

John said:

There is obviously a limit to the size of the page that we can download. I think that is around 10 megabytes. So if you have your content within those 10 megabytes, then we will be able to recognize that and show that in search.

Here is the video:

Forum discussion at Google+.

Google: Panda Refresh Not Likely Happening On July 4th Weekend

A month ago today, we reported that Gary Illyes from said a Panda refresh is coming within 2-4 weeks or so. Well, it has been over 4 weeks now and still no refresh, but that is not uncommon, launch dates with Google often get delayed, yes - even with the Panda updates.

Yesterday, in a German Google Hangout, John (Johannes) Mueller from Google said in German that the refresh is coming soon. Oliver Engelbrecht from seo-portal.de transcribed it, "I think the next update, I don't know if it's coming this week or next week, but in any case it should be released soon."

But I was nervous even with the transcription by a German speaking individual, that something got lost.

So I asked John Mueller in the English hangout this morning on Google+ about what he said at the 24:15 mark.

He basically said, yes, it is still coming "fairly soon," but he wouldn't expect it to go live on the July 4th weekend. Today, July 3rd, is an official holiday, so Googlers are off in Mountain View. But he did say expect it to happen "in a few weeks." If I had to guess, maybe next Thursday night.

Here is the video at the start time:

Here is the transcript as I typed it:

We have this question from Barry *sigh*

On Thursday, in the German hangout, I am told you said the Panda refresh is coming this week or next. Or did you still mean it can come even later than next week?...

So a few weeks ago we said that this refresh will be happening in a few weeks and so it is kind of coming up. I doubt it is going to happen this week because it is a holiday and it is Friday and people are busy doing other things.

But I imagine in the next couple of weeks this is something that might be happening. So that kind of sets expectations. We try not to provide an exact date for when these things roll out because things can always change. But I expect this to happen fairly soon.

Next week, John is on vacation and I am pretty sure Gary Illyes is traveling - so I am a bit nervous the communication line around the Panda refresh will be delayed. But I will do my best to keep you updated.

Forum discussion at Google+ and Google Webmaster Help.