Fetch & render tool not rendering static text content - do I have a problem?

[AndyMacLean]

Hi,Some of the content on my pages are not rendering in the Google fetch and render tool (it does in the fetch). It's just regular static content in html, not in JS or CSS or anything like that and theres no explanation in the list of reasons for things that Google couldn't get the resources for, which in this case relate to CDN images and google maps.Does anyone know why this might be? (open divs was a suggestion, but doesn't seem to be the case). Is it a bug with the tool? If Google isn't rendering the content does that have implications for SEO?Thanks in advance.Andy

[RyanPurkey]

Have you tried looking at the site in a text browser like Lynx? That should at least give you another approximation of how Google will see the page. Beyond that you could use a more robust tool like Fiddler to dig into the issue.

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Andy,

Here are the things that I would do to troubleshoot this problem (you have probably already done some of these things but here we go):

• Check robots.txt to make sure none of the page's resources are being blocked there
• Make sure you have no render-blocking CSS or JS happening above the static resources that may be causing the render tool to time out or otherwise not render the text
• Use the MozBar to view the page with JavaScript disabled, and then with the User-Agent set as Googlebot, to see how the page looks/whether the unrendered content is visible that way
• Right-click the unrendered content and select "Inspect Element" to get a detailed view of the HTML element and make sure the content is appearing (this will give you a more detailed view than using "View Source" would)
• Google a block of the unrendered text in quotes to see if that content on that page is, in fact being indexed

If the page passes all of those tests, it might just be that the text content on your page is big enough that the Fetch + Render tool isn't rendering all of it to save on bandwidth. This is what I suspect is happening especially since the missing content isn't showing up in the list of resources Google couldn't access. Sometimes the render tool doesn't fully render large blocks of static text content (at one point their guidelines suggested that they started limiting after 200 KB of visible text, but that page appears to have been updated to remove that information).

Basically this happens because one of Google's top expenditures is bandwidth - it takes a tonnnnn of data, and therefore money, to crawl and index the web, which is why things like crawl budgets are important. So sometimes they save themselves some bandwidth by not fully rendering static resources in the fetch and render tool. If the content is being indexed, I wouldn't worry about it.