Webmaster Tools Fetch & Render, Blocked Resources

Google recently announced on their official webmaster blog that two new updates had been made for their Google Webmaster Tool (GWT) users.

The first update that Google announced was about their Fetch & Render report. 

From now on, in addition to its original features, GWT will show you how GoogleBot sees your website compared to how one of your visitors (a normal website visitor) sees the same site. With that being said, Google didn’t openly announce this being the main purpose of their improvement, but for any experienced Google Webmaster Tools user that is pretty obvious

Google also released a new Blocked Resources report to help webmasters figure out which hosts are blocking which resources on your website, and the purpose of this report is to help you with four different items down below.

The first out of four things that Google’s Blocked Resource report can help you with is to provide you with a list of hosts that provide resources to your website that are being blocked by robots.txt rules. You will soon find out that those blocked resources being shown in the report are resources both being hosted on your own sites, as well as hosted by others.

In addition to showing you the blocked resources on your website, GWT’s blocked resource report allows you to click on any of the hosts in the list to find additional information. The information given is a full list of blocked resources from the given host together with useful information telling you which pages on your website are being affected by each and every one of the blocked resources.

If this wasn’t enough for a new and useful webmaster tool Google also allows you to click on any of the blocked resources in the table being shown, and that will give you additional information about your own webpages that load the resource. 

Last but not least, and probably one of the most useful functions in this new report is the ability for you to get information from Google on how to unblock those resources.

By clicking on any of the pages being shown in the table, you will receive instructions on how to unblock the resource and that will give you one issue less to worry about and more time to maximize your SEO.

Have you connected your Google Webmaster Tools to your Rank Ranger account? If not, I suggest you do it now!

About The Author

Joel has many years of hands-on experience working in SEO for a variety of European and international businesses. His great knowledge and deep understanding of what it takes to become a real SEO Pro shines through in his passion to help Rank Ranger customers understand the benefits of utilizing our platform.