It was frightening to see all of my Google Ads stop working due to the Google smartphone bot not being able to see a website. Troubleshooting the issue I learned that the GoDaddy CDN server was explicitly blocking the Google smart phone bot. Now this probably wasn’t their design, but the outcome is that this is what was happening. And so every time I ran the website through the Google Mobile Friendly Test, it resulted in an error which stated that the Google smartphone bot could not see the website. Consequently Google labeled the website as not mobile friendly.
Here are my ads, every single one of them resulted in a “destination not working” error. Now the website was clearly visible to customers and it was clearly responsive and visible on mobile and desktop, but it was simply the case that the smartphone bot was being blocked from viewing the website
Fixing the Interference between Google Smartphone Bot and Godaddy CDN
After running the website through the Google search console to determine what the issue could be, as you can see from the image below all of the CSS files and other files housed within GoDaddy’s CDN server were accessible to the Google smartphone bot which resulted in a “page is not mobile friendly” error which consequently disabled all of my ads from running.
Fixing the interference between the Google smartphone bot and the GoDaddy CDN server was simply a matter of turning off the GoDaddy CDN server. The WordPress website was already running a CDN from Jetpack and there are numerous ways to optimize a wordpress website without utilizing GoDaddy’s CDN. At any rate by turning off the GoDaddy CDN server, and re-running the test, the Google smartphone bot was again able to see the website and the ads able to run again.
This simple fix was frustrating to come by, and I was surprised that this interference could actually happen. Because I really don’t think that GoDaddy intended to block the Google crawler but that is what is happening and it is detrimental in more ways than one. It kills your SEO and if you’re running ads, those become disabled, and lastly it destroys a website’s search rankings if not corrected.
This problem resulted in significant profit loss because campaigns were not able to run and the time spent trying to troubleshoot the issue was time that could’ve been spent on other optimization operations. I’ve been working with clients for numerous years, and beyond marketing most of my activity is troubleshooting IT problems, and if your website, whether that be WordPress, Shopify, Magento, whatever it may be, is experiencing issues in one way or another, digging into the details is where the solutions can usually be found.
I hope this brief write up is helpful to anyone who is experiencing this problem and, having tried numerous options are at a loss as to why their responsive website is still appearing as “Not Mobile Friendly” on Google. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me.
