Search Engine Inability to Detect Responsive Design
By Josh Lewis on Monday, 27 April 2015
Posted in Technical Issues
Replies 6
Likes 0
Views 1.4K
Votes 0
Background:
I recently read a blog post about SEO practices and robots.txt for Joomla. The gist is that responsive design is a ranking factor in Google, however not all responsive design is viewable to the search engine due to the robots.txt file. Non responsive pages are ranked lower now which is another reason this is an important issue.

Problem:
According to Google's Mobile friendly test, EasySocial is not responsive due to the theme files being hidden (currently they are in the components directory). Here's what ES looks like according to Google:



A few notes the tool tells me are:

  • Content wider than screen

  • Links too close together

  • This page uses 3 resources which are blocked by robots.txt

The template itself is pretty responsive.

Solution:
Move the theme CSS and possibly JS (as needed) to the media folder of Joomla. There is an on going discussion about this on Github. Joomla Docs seems to also point at this. The Joomla community seems to very much want the components directory hidden from search engines and have the needed media files in the media folder. Just giving a heads up on this, this is meant as a constructive post for better SEO results. And as always, we appreciate the work you guys do.
Hi Josh

Thank you for the solution you provide.

Best Regards
Chris
Christopher Chiam
·
Monday, 27 April 2015 20:03
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
It's a proposal for EasySocial rather than a solution that we can do ourselves. For now I can use the "allow method" of robots.txt to prevent the files from being hidden from Google. But do note that most EasySocial users will not know about this and will be penalized from Google and other search engines for their responsive theme files being hidden. This is the number one reason we should have the theme files moved to the media folder. Brian Teeman, the Co-founder of Joomla recently talked about this subject and said:

They shouldnt be storing it there. They should be storing it in /media.


I had no involvement with the discussion from where that was said. This is a case where a minor bad practice has visible effects on a site. Again, mostly in the SEO world.
Josh Lewis
·
Friday, 01 May 2015 17:34
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hello Josh,

Thanks for the heads up on this! We are actually considering placing theme files under the /media folder in the near future
Mark
·
Monday, 04 May 2015 16:57
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Thanks Mark, I understand that this can be a bit tricky considering all the files that depend on the theme files (the modules for example would have to access the new paths). Aside from Google recently making a drastic change with the robots.txt, I figure ES 1.4 is a good series to include this in with all the beta testers and the possibility of splitting up the core files as mentioned else where to speed up pages that use ES extensions without the component. Let me know if you need help with planning this.

Glad you guys had a good holiday break, I'm actually pretty happy that the Stacked team took some well deserved rest this weekend.
Josh Lewis
·
Monday, 04 May 2015 17:26
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
subscribe++
Kevin
·
Monday, 04 May 2015 21:39
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Thanks for the heads up on this Josh
Mark
·
Monday, 04 May 2015 22:16
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
View Full Post