Search Console - Mobile Usability Errors

[DougRoberts]

A site I'm looking at for a client had 100's of pages flagged as having Mobile Usability errors in Search Console.

I found that the theme uses parameters in the URLs of some of theme resources (.js/.css) to identify the version strings.

These were then being blocked by a rule in the robots.txt: "Disallow: /*?"

I've removed this rule, and now when I inspect URLs and test the live versions of the page they are now being reported as mobile friendly.

I then submitted validation requests in Search Console for both of the errors ("Text to small" and "Clickable Elements too close")

My problem now, is that the validation has completed and the pages are still being reported as having the errors.

I've double checked and they're find if I inspect them individually.

Does anyone else have experience clearing these issues in Search Console?  Any ideas what's going on here!

[Dalerio-Consulting]

I've had the same issue when one of my clients disallowed a directory that contained the CSS and some other scripts.

What you should do is make sure 100% that you have removed any conflicting line from the robots.txt file, then you should go to the robots.txt testing tool from Google and see whether it's updated. If not, you just make a request for it to be updated, and usually, it's done within 30 min. Then you should run the Google mobile-friendly test and see if there are any issues.

If both of the tests return positive results, then you should request at the search console to "validate fix". After that, it usually takes up to a week for it to be removed from the pages with errors.
If it's a small number of links, you can also "text live URL" within the search console, and then "request indexing". As mentioned, if everything goes right, it should take up to one week for the errors to be removed.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

[DougRoberts]

Thanks for your response Daniel. The steps you outlined are exactly what I have done - which is why after requesting validate fix I was surprised that the pages came back with errors still!

I've submitted a validate fix request again so I'll see what happens...

[DougRoberts]

Just to follow this up. We're now seeing the mobile usability error reports gradually being removed from pages at approximagely 100 pages / day.

It just seemed to me that the whole validation request process didn't actually appear to do anything and we just had to wait for the site to be recrawled?!