Archived topic
Likely "false" warning on Search Console and how to deal with it
5 replies · Started by Mathieu on April 15, 2021
Hi everyone
I'm not sure this is the right place to ask but it's worth a try.
After switching to GeneratePress, I got a few warnings from Search Console about text being too small / clickable content being too close together. I've seen these errors in the past and they always turned out to be false warnings, because the pages looked fine on mobile. Very often, hitting the Validate button resulted in a positive outcome.
This time, Search Console is being stubborn on a specific page where, in addition to the usual two errors mentioned above, it is also saying that the content is wider than the screen.
I've checked the entire article carefully, even tried to remove the content and add it back bit by bit to see if there would a specific element creating a conflict, I've checked the URL on iOS and Android (for what it's worth), and I just can't find a problem with it. The page looks absolutely fine on mobile and the PageSpeed score is 92/96 on average.
Yet, if I use the Mobile Friendly Test, Google insists on saying that the page is not mobile friendly, showing a screenshot where all the content is compressed on the left rather than occupying the entire sceeen.
At this point, I'm not sure what to do? Should I just ignore the SC warning and hope it will stop seeing the errors by itself? Should I dig deeper in trying to find out why SC sees the page in the wrong way? It's hard to try to fix something when there is nothing to fix!
The page is this one:
https://mirrorlesscomparison.com/best/sony-a7iii-accessories/
It's a long article, so all I can think of is that google doesn't crawl it properly because of it (but I have other long articles that pass the mobile friendly test so...).
Any input is appreciated.
Thank you for your time!
Mat
Hi there,
i think it is purely down to the size of that page.
Checking the site on Mobile Friendly Test it shows over 100 resources couldn't be loaded - reporting the ambiguous Other error.
Which generally means that googles servers could not allocate enough resources to load all of that page - so it gets fed up and moves on without loading all resources it requires to render the page properly.
Aside of paginating the post i can't really suggest what else to do.
Thank you for the response David.
When I removed the content of the page and then added it back bit by bit, the page rendered fine for a little while then started to show the errors again. At that point, I've only added 20% of the article back (if that), so if what you're saying is true, then Google servers get fed up pretty quickly LOL.
If i had 10's of billions of pages to crawl i would get fed up rather quickly as well lol
Can't say why that particular page is having an issue - it may just be a case of that post is being checked more frequently than the others.
Generally this issue arises due to poor site optimziation - but i don't see that being the issue in regards to resource delivery. Completely subjective, but i think its the shear amount of HTML that is having to be processed - large DOM trees require a lot more memory to process the CSS for the final layout - if somewhere along the line the memory runs short or its just taking too long to process then google will abort and move on to the next test.
If i had 10’s of billions of pages to crawl i would get fed up rather quickly as well lol
Good point! ;-)
Thanks again!
You're welcome:)
