Starting this week, Google has promoted the use of mobile to the point where they are labeling mobile friendly sites with a tag in the search results.
For much of my browsing, I use Opera 11.6 and to access some sites, I have to use Firefox 15 (pain). This is where the madness begins...
When I try to run google'sGoogle's page-speed insights and test any website with it inside the Opera browser, the progress bar goes to a crawl at about 90% then stalls at 99% and never completes. In firefoxFirefox, I get results very quickly.
Today, I got word from googleGoogle as follows:
Is your site mobile-friendly? Starting April 21, Google Search will be expanding its use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. Double-check example.com and your other sites are ready for this change by testing pages of your site with the Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
I then proceed in Opera to run the test. I instantly get an error in a red box stating: "Failed to fetch the requested URL. Dismiss"
Naturally I turn to firefoxFirefox and try again, and walk out with the exact same results.
A week ago I did the exact same tests, and I was told that my site is mobile friendly, yet I did not make any changes to block out googleGoogle.
When I tested my site with curl command line tool, I receive the results as expected.
So my question is are google'sGoogle's tools really broken or did they change their IP address and/or user agent to the point where they are acting like someone without authorization to access any site?
And yes I am still able to test my site on webpagetest.org.
Any ideas?
UPDATE:
I just logged into the server where the website in question is hosted, and apacheApache has not made a log of a request from googleGoogle when I ran the mobile friendly test.
