Google Mobile Search Descriptions Now Say If You’re Blocking Google

Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji announced on Google+ that now Google’s mobile search results snippets will show a message to searchers when Google is unable to show the snippet to searchers because the webmaster to blocking their crawlers.

Back in August 2012, Google added this feature to desktop search, where a webmaster blocked GoogleBot and Google would show that URL in the search results, Google would show a message as to why they were unable to show a fully developer search results snippet.

Now, Google is bringing this feature to mobile search results, even when the desktop version is fully crawlable, but the mobile version is blocking Google.

For example, a search on [deals] in Google show the desktop version showing the full snippet but the mobile version with a blocked snippet. The message Google shows reads “A description for this result is not available because of this site’s robots.txt – learn more.” The learn more link goes to this page.

Here is a picture of the mobile version:

Here is a picture of the desktop version:

This message may show in the mobile results when you block Google mobile from crawling “critical” files such as JavaScript, CSS or images files. Zineb added Google will “display a message in place of the description snippet for mobile search results blocking Googlebot for smartphones, just as we already do for search results blocking Googlebot.”

Here is yet another reason to make sure to test how your site looks on mobile search.