Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files. Does this matter?

[David-Kley]

We use a few compression tools to help speed up slow underperforming sites. I have seen a few messages in Webmaster tools stating that "Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files". Question is: Does this matter? Can this hurt the ranking potential, or is this a warning for best practices that is open to speculation?

Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files

[GlobeRunner]

Yes, this is actually one of those things that is important. If you're blocking .CSS and .JS files, then your rankings may suffer. There are things you can do in .CSS and JavaScript to present the site to users differently than what you show the bots.

You need to unblock these files and allow the search engines to crawl them.

[LoganRay]

Hi,

This is part of Google's webmaster guidelines as of 2014. Allowing Googlebot to access your CSS and JS files helps them understand how your site works and verify that it works properly. It's part of their effort to provide better results, not only in content, but in usability as well.

[David-Kley]

Thanks for the reply.

The files are not blocked, just highly compressed (and some are set to cache). I wonder if they are getting confused when trying to read the files...