This is neat, now Google will show you how bad it is when you block specific content, assets or resources from GoogleBot in the Fetch and Render tool within the Google Search Console. John Mueller announced this on Google+ saying "Search Console now shows the estimated severity of blocked resources with the Fetch & Render tool." Items such as "embedded content (like images, scripts, CSS files, etc) sometimes plays a big role in how Google's able to render & index a page for search," John Mueller added.
Now you know if it is critical or not to unblock a resource for GoogleBot to see. Assuming Google gets it right.
Here is a screen shot of this home page, showing that the only items blocked are "low" severity because I guess they are Google embeds mostly.
Click on it to enlarge that image above, or see the image John shared over here:
This is great, because a common question Google gets is how important is it that I unblock this or that resource. Now Google is telling you!
John Mueller wrote:
Why is this an issue at all, why can't Google be happy with just HTML anymore? For one, if your site is mobile-friendly, we'd like to recognize that. Also, some sites use embedded content to pull in additional information that we'd love to show that site for. For example, if you're using an API to pull in and display your business' branches + opening hours, we'd love to use that to send people your way... but we can only do that if we can see that content.
Very very cool and nice feature add Google!
Forum discussion at Google+.
