Blocked Cache Directory from Google Bots Triggering Mobile-Friendliness Issue

This is heavy. Over the last two days we got the mobile unfriendly red flag from Google for everything there is on our multi site network (so hundreds of thousands of pages). Not sure about the actual rating impact but I assume it will not be lightly ??

The problem was easy to trace back. The robots.txt now has a

# BEGIN W3TC ROBOTS
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
# END W3TC ROBOTS

statement. That effectively blocks most .css (including the important files from wp-content/cache/minify).

In our case the statement was added on 2021-09-03 00:06:10 (I assume somewhen around this time there was a plugin update?).

Quickfix obviously is to change that back from hand, write protect it and bulk inform Google via the Search Console that the issues have been fixed. (I couldn’t find a way to change/fix it via plugin settings but I haven’t looked long.)

@galfom Thank you! You are right and that is exactly what I did as a quick fix. Looking forward to a solution from W3TC so that I can enable writing permission for the robots.txt file back.

Hello @abrarmohi @galfom

Thank you for reaching out and I am sorry about the issue you are experiencing.
This issue is reported numerous times and we already gave a Github issue reported for this.
The temporary solution is either to revert back to the previous version of W3TC or to change the permission for the robots.txt file.
Please refer to the existing topic for this issue where the Github issue is posted
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/w3tc-conflict-with-aioseo/

Thanks!

Hello @abrarmohi eddievet @galfom

We have released a patch in version 2.1.8. We do apologize for any inconvenience. Please update and do let us know if there are any issues. We will be happy to assist you.
Thank you.