A recent update to the Google Search Console this week gives webmasters better insight into blocked content such as images, CSS and JavaScript. Google have given a lot more focus to blocked content in the past few months which was particularly noticeable with the ‘Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files’ alert (which annoyed a lot of people).
The new tool cleverly renders pages as a crawler would see it via a number of screenshots as well as providing High, Medium and Low warnings depending on the severity of blocked content.
This update is aimed at improving accessible content for crawlers and so is very poignant from an SEO perspective. The emphasis Google is placing on these blocked resources is a clear indication that this content is a ranking consideration (and if not now, it soon will be). This is confirmed by John Mueller, who made the announcement, who stated that blocking/unblocking resources ““sometimes plays a big role in how Google’s able to render & index a page for search”.
So there you have it!