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I get the error "Couldn't load 23 page resources" when doing the mobile friendly test at

https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

However, the error message is (the rather unfriendly) "Other error."

When I visit the site in Chrome using Developer Tools and setting the device toolbar to "Responsive," it works fine with no errors, and when I go the Google Search Console and do Crawl->Fetch As Google, I get no errors.

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    If you want help with the issue, I believe it would be easier on Google's Webmaster Central Help forum, because this will likely require lots of analyzing your site and asking you questions about lots of stuff before reaching any conclusion. // If it gets resolved, you could then edit this question if needed and answer it yourself to make it useful for other people. – Oskar Skog Jul 19 '17 at 19:51
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    ... Or a different webmasters' forum. But I can mention two reasons why WMC is the right choice: access to Google through Top Contributors and Rising Stars, and I know there's "no" SEO scum there. (They exist, but get stopped before they cause any harm.) – Oskar Skog Jul 19 '17 at 19:54
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    Scott, I use both tools and there are indeed discrepancies in the number of issues and how they fetch. I prefer GSC's native UI, because your site is verified and it knows your site a little better than MFT. That said, MFT is still worth examining. Check for issues like blocked resources and heavy images and font files. I'd take care of any GSC issues first. For a list of possible (non-robots.txt related) "other errors," check out their documentation: support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6352293?hl=en . Good luck! – Henry Visotski Jul 19 '17 at 21:15
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    @HenryVisotski: It looks like it was intermittent. The "other error" applies to timeouts (tested) so it's reasonable that it would apply when Googlebot decides to not even try as well ("temporarily unreachable" in Fetch as Google contains these two cases). But if that's the case, then Googlebot decided to not try any single resource at all which sounds kind of implausible. // I also can't find a list of error statuses on that help doc. (That's why I had to do a test.) – Oskar Skog Jul 19 '17 at 22:38
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    are your scripts blocked against crawling? robots.txt? – Evgeniy Mar 1 at 11:16
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I had 6 instances of "other errors" (4 images and 2 stylesheets) and continually hitting the refresh button didn't help. here's what I think finally fixed it for me:

  1. I switched 2 of the images from relative to absolute paths. that fixed both of those.

  2. I removed the type="text/css" from my css head tags that called the 2 stylesheets. so, they now have only the rel and the href -- like this <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://www.example.com/styles.css">. that fixed the remaining 4 errors. (apparently the remaining 2 images were being called in the stylesheets.)

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  • removing text/css fixed it for us. thanks! – anonymous-one Sep 13 at 22:54
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"load 23 page resources" that sounds like your page has a Lot of resources to load.

The mobile tester doesn't like 'heavy' pages.

There are many ways this mimics what it might be like loading it a real mobile device that might have a unstable data connection.

Make the page 'lighter' - loading less 'crud' & the page will load quicker, and hence more 'friendly'.

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According to this support thread, "Other error" may be that Googlebot reached the limit of the number of requests it is willing to make to a server to prevent it from overwhelming the website with requests.

There was not a definitive answer, but that appears to be the response. If this is true, I wish the "error" message was changed to something like "Rate Limit Reached"...

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Check your robots.txt to see if it's blocking GoogleBot from any required to load the page.

For example, you could possibly have a CSS script in the <head> that calls a URL that's disallowed in your robots.txt

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  • What if I have no robots.txt? – Aaron Franke Jan 6 at 2:40
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    If you have no robots.txt, then nothing is being blocked - so that isn't an issue. – xgretsch Apr 11 at 10:36

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