for a long time I get weird error messages from Google. I add all my sites to the Google Search Console. Every month or so I get the messages, that 3 errors occur:
text is too small to read on mobile
content is to close to each other on mobile
content is too wide for mobile
Now I do not change a thing. I press “start validation” and after a while I get the confirmation that all errors are fixed.
It happens to all sites I add to the search console.
Which leads me to the assumption that the Google crawler does a quick scan of the site and somehow gets misleading information about text size, etc. Especially since a fix is not necessary but only validation.
This is out of my league. I do not exactly know how the crawler sees the site before it is completely rendered, but perhaps it happens to others as well and we can try to figure it out.
Is anyone else experiencing this?
Please add which framework or theme you use. @dan@isaiah have you heard about this?
I get the same, plus lots of other erroneous messages. Plus, when you click various links within console to view various errors, on the page that opens it says there are no errors or gives entirely new errors.
I’ve concluded that much like lots of the backend to various Google tools, the problem is Google, not my (or your) websites. IMO almost everything Google produce in the shape of tools for websites is complete pants and best ignored. If the tool results in ways for them to extract money from you, it works, otherwise, it’s junk.
It’s Google. I’ve seen this a few times. Drove myself nuts trying to ‘fix’ it the first few times, but getting Google to re-test always came back fine - for a few days, at least.
The problem: If I do not “fix” it by revalidation, the sites gets a bad mark for mobile compatibility. And beginning in May, mobile is the first criteria for SEO and search results listings.
Same here. I got error messages similar to the ones Fuellemann mentions from Google for the mobile usability on sites I did with Foundry and on 1 template based site. Before putting a site online I check and doublecheck my site for the usability for mobiles since this has become so important. It drove me crazy since I couldn’t find out what was wrong.
The weird thing is, I used the same template for 2 different sites. One gets errors, the other one seems fine.
Meanwhile the errors seem to be fixed.
Thanks @Panans what are the differences in the templates regarding the used stacks? Is one of them also in your Foundry projects? Can we narrow it down?
All, mostly UIkit and latterly Foundry 2. Errors appear and disappear at random with them all.
Until July, when they will change it. Then Sept, when they change it again.
Honest, IMO just ignore all this sort of nonsense that come from Google. If we as developers acted on every Google whim, we’d all be busy, and frustrated fools. In 20 odd years of doing this I’ve mostly ignored all their whims and just focused on the core things regards onsite SEO: Good structure, clear navigation and content content CONTENT!
With a couple of exceptions, all my sites get very respectable results, which largely haven’t changed over the years, despite the constant moving of the goalposts by Google.
If you have a client who is obsessed by the various Google tool results, as I recently did (again) you’re best educating them about the pitfalls of chasing Google perfection. If they still insist they want top scores in all things Google send them a very large invoice
Bear in mind though we most likely have very different client bases, so my approach might not work if you live more in the corporate world.
@Fuellemann. I used Navigator theme as the template for 2 sites. Altough the site without errors is far more complicated as the one that gave me errors. In the ‘error-site’ I used Layouts Stack by 1LD, so that may have caused it there. Not sure though. It’s a simple two page, straight forward site.
The Foundry-site was built around Potion and Thunder, next to the stacks that come with Foundry. I also used RWML stacks (3 languages) and SEO helper by Joe Workman, but I use these stacks in almost every site I make. Never had problems with those.
I tend to agree with @TemplateRepo here. It looks random.
@Fuellemann, In the Foundry site that gave me errors I checked the breakpoints in the menu and the footer for mobile use. Once I did little changes there, the errors where gone.
So, maybe, who knows, …
I also started to simplify the mobile versions of the sites. Content that can be considered as ‘eye candy’ are not always useful on small screens (quotes, animations,…) . I no longer publish this stacks on Mobile.
I just checked the console. Google listed two errors on one page of a site. Last errored reported Feb 6th. I clicked thru the various pages and eventually got to the “re-analysis” page. After the inspection it came back with no errors. I then returned to the main console page, re-ran the tests, and the same two error messages appeared.
@Fuellemann, it’s mostly finetuning while preview in simulate mode is open. For instance changing a left alignment in a stack to a center alignment for mobile. That kind of things.
I’m facing the same issue sometimes, validations fix it also, without any further actions on the website. I’m using foundation. Seems to be an google bug.
I use Foundry and this has happened randomly at various times. Google search console is most unhelpful in not telling you which bit of the page is affected so it’s appalling to try and track down. I’m with the other commenters that it gets to the point you just have no choice but to ignore it, but it is a concern if they’re scoring the site down on mobile functionality SEO.
To be honest, I followed all the guidelines for SEO in building my new site on the Rapidweaver tutorials and various other places. When I launched the site, the google search ranking plummetted, so I’m of the view that we’re really quite powerless to do anything against the algorithm. Time is better spent elsewhere, trying to fix these random errors just sucks up hours and hours of otherwise useful time.
I had these two errors in the footer of the Realmac site. I fixed it by switching from a paragraph stack for the text (probably shouldn’t have been using that anyway), to a linked list. I also made the text and spacing bigger (if I remember correctly). That fixed the issue. Done in Foundry.
Google is a fickle beast and from my experience you don’t need too hit 100% to be ranking well.
