Project menu ≡

Official Google answers to common SEO questions

Enter your question:

Question:

If I externalize all CSS style definitions and JavaScript scripts and disallow all user agents from accessing these external files (via robots.txt), would this cause problems for Googlebot? Does Googlebot need access to these files?

Google's Matt Cutts answers:

Official Google Answer

Summary of the answer:

The summary of the answer is available to paid members. Become a member now. It's fast, easy and risk-free.

Related questions:

Question Views
Optimizing the order of scripts and styles 888
If Google crawls 1,000 pages/day, Googlebot crawling many dupe content pages may slow down indexing of a large site. In that scenario, do you recommend blocking dupes using robots.txt or is using Meta Robots noindex,nofollow a better alternative? 923
Should a "Sale Page" be in a robots.txt file to avoid duplicate content? 900
Can I use robots.txt to optimize Googlebot's crawl? 759
Uncrawled URLs in search results 1,157
Now that Google can crawl JavaScript links, what is going to happen with all those paid links that were behind JavaScript code? 917
How does Google calculate site load times in the data it exposes in Google's webmaster statistics? 767
Is it a good thing to put 'nofollow' in links to a disclaimer, privacy statement and other pages like that with the internal PageRank in mind? 939
How can Googlebot crawl and index pages that don't have any links to them on my website? 896
We still have old content in the index. We block them via robots.txt, use 404 and delete via Webmaster Tools, but Google still keeps it. What can we do to quickly delete content from the index? 856