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I have just had an email from google console to say “New Mobile Usability issue detected for site https://unusualplaces.org/“ and below that it says

  • Viewport not set
  • Text too small to read
  • Clickable elements too close together

As I have had the website as it is for several years I assume they have changed their criteria but really not sure what is wrong. Looking further into the console it has an example http://unusualplaces.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/ and says only one page is affected. And that page is not supposed to be accessible to bots. Really confused. Any help greatly appreciated.

My robots.txt looks like that:

User-agent: * 
Disallow: /wp-admin/ 
Disallow: /wp-includes/ 
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/ 
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/

So, basically, the new search console is pointing out usability errors on mobile devices on wordpress upload pages, that is, pages where I can not change font size, viewport window and things like that, how do I solve it, or what to do with that google does not take those pages into account.

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  • I changed indexing option for this folder to "No Indexing" in Cpanel advanced option. But is this really a solution?
    – ilushkin
    Dec 11, 2018 at 8:58
  • I don't think that usability problems on a single page will have any effect on the rest of your site in terms of SEO. It means that particular page won't rank well on mobile search. Dec 11, 2018 at 12:23
  • The example URL you've linked to is a 404?
    – MrWhite
    Dec 11, 2018 at 14:55
  • Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is a good place to start: search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
    – INTP5
    Sep 15, 2019 at 12:28

2 Answers 2

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I like to use the Developer Tools (F12) in my browser to debug this. There's a Responsive Mode icon in the tool bar for both Chrome and Firefox. Top left in Chrome and top right in FF. I used this a couple of weeks ago for the same message. I turned on the mobile view port and looked over the problem page. I found links that when viewed through a mobile view port, were overlapping other links in my footer. After correcting the problem, I marked the problem as solved in Google and it hasn't showed back up.

As Mr. White stated, the page you have identified returns a 404 so we can't look at your page to help much further. I'm not sure how you solve the problems since you say the pages cannot be edited, but using Developer Tools might point you to the problem.

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I have exactly the same issue - it popped out today. Go here - https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch, type the URL you're having problem with and click "Fetch and render". After that you will see how Google sees your page.

In my case Disqus seems to be a problem this is how Googlebot sees it - users see it differently of course

This is how Googlebot sees it. Of course users see it differently. Do the test yourself and it should tell you where to start.

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