Yesterday we covered some SEO theories around blocking JavaScript & CSS triggering Panda 4.0 issues. I didn’t honestly believe there was a relation, based on the example provided and very few other sites reporting the same effects but now we have a response from a Googler.
Well, maybe the response is a bit Google-like and cloudy.
One webmaster posted the theory on Google Webmaster Help and John Mueller responded to the specific case at hand, not necessarily Panda 4 and how it related to blocking CSS & JavaScript. But he did respond to the question about being hit by Panda and blocking content via external files.
John Mueller of Google wrote:
Allowing crawling of JavaScript and CSS makes it a lot easier for us to recognize your site’s content and to give your site the credit that it deserves for that content. For example, if you’re pulling in content via AJAX/JSON feeds, that would be invisible to us if you disallowed crawling of your JavaScript. Similarly, if you’re using CSS to handle a responsive design that works fantastically on smartphones, we wouldn’t be able to recognize that if the CSS were disallowed from crawling. This is why we make the recommendation to allow crawling of URLs that significantly affect the layout or content of a page. I’m not sure which JavaScript snippet you’re referring to, but it sounds like it’s not the kind that would be visible at all. If you’re seeing issues, they would be unrelated to that piece of JavaScript being blocked from crawling.
So is John saying that if you block content, then it may impact the Panda algorithm? Is he saying that? Or is he saying that the content that is blocked, Google can’t see anyway and it has no impact on Panda? Or maybe it may or may not have an impact on Panda because Panda is about content and maybe layout?
See how this can get confusing. What is your take?
