Google Search Console

Google Search Console can provide useful insights on the indexing on your website and on the keywords that bring you organic traffic.

Nonetheless, the reports can be slightly misleading, and you might in particular get the following messages:

Page Indexing issue: Blocked by robots.txt

This message means that the Google crawler has found some pages on your website for which the instructions we provide in the robots.txt file indicate that they should not be indexed.

This is by design: the pages in questions include for example image price pages and search results. Google allocates an “indexing quota” to websites, depending on their popularity, so it is important to help the crawler focus on the important content and avoid indexing pages that are not likely to be useful SEO-wise, especially for photography websites with lots of image pages.

This is therefore not an error and you can safely ignore that warning.

Mobile Usability issue: Content wider than screen

Google Console sometimes reports that a specific page does not display well on mobile because its content is too wide.

This is usually a Google Console bug, and the message may come up even if you haven’t changed the page in question in a long time. We recommend you proceed as follows:

• Check the page in question on your mobile phone to make sure it works properly and without horizontal scrolling. PhotoDeck pages are designed to be mobile-friendly, but it is for example always possible to add custom HTML code that doesn’t scale well on small displays.
• Once you have checked that the page is indeed fine on your mobile phone, use Google Console’s Validate fix feature to force them to check it again. In most cases, the error will disappear by itself within a few days.