Google Mobile Readiness tool showing “fail” for a joomla site – Redid the Robots.txt file and it showed ‘success’ = Quirky Tool

Last Updated on November 30, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla

I was doing a monthly checkup on a client’s Joomla 3.x site. The site had previously showed OK in Google’s Mobile Readiness tool.

The GMRT was saying that access to the /media and /templates folder was blocked even though there were no disallow lines for these folders.

I cut all of the disallow lines from Robots.txt.. The GMRT showed “success”.. I added the disallow lines back in a couple at a time. Each time I checked the GMRT it showed “Success”.

I had finally added back in all of the lines and the GMRT was still happy.

That makes no sense as the robots.txt is a simple text based file. Removing and re-adding the disallow lines should have had no effect.

Conclusions

1. Check your site with Google Webmaster Tools and the Google Mobile Readiness Checker regularly. i.e. at least every month if  not every week.
2. If you have a problem, try cutting the disallow lines, saving robots.txt and then adding the disallow lines back in.