Mobile usability validation

[illmasterj]

One of my sites has seen a spike in mobile usability issues in GSC over the last month-ish. Usually I can just "Validate Fix" and away we go. This time is different:

Cannot continue validation process
Affected pages were found. Fix the issue and run validation again

When I do a "Test Live URL" on the individual URLs from this list, it's all working correctly, and I can request them to be indexed. But the "Validate Fix" function just gives me the run around (even after verifying the 3 URLs as working correctly).

This feels like a script was loaded incorrectly and is cached or something. Do I just wait patiently? Is there something I can do?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'm not sure exactly what's going on in this case but I can add some context.

The mobile-friendly tester tool thing they provide has been flat out broken for years. They know it and have acknowledged it. The same problem exists within the automated tool who's results they give you in Search Console.

The problem being that many times the tool refuses to load the CSS and JS files. It just times out. So, like you've mentioned, out of nowhere your site will throw a zillion mobile errors and then you can resolve them immediately.

It's almost always issues related to CSS loading, making "links too small as touch-targets, links too close together, stuff sticks off the side of the viewport" and so forth.

If you've confirmed there's no problem manually, then that's all you need to worry about, per Google's guidance on this issue. I don't know why they don't fix it.

But to bring all back to the point I was trying to make... It's probably a bug stacked on top of the bug I just described.

 

[illmasterj]

Yeah this is the usual error I see. If you dig into it, usually CSS or JS is tagged with "Other error". As a result, the page doesn't load correctly.

Still, consider me paranoid but every time I see a growing number of pages with issues in Search Console I have a mild panic, hoping a core update doesn't roll out with crap data.

 

[illmasterj]

Still having this issue. 2 pages refuse to index because GSC says it isn't mobile friendly due to not loading CSS/JS files ("other error").

Damn opaque error, the best I can find is that it seems to be down to crawl budget but this site has plenty of links.

Robots.txt allows crawling. Am I missing something or do I just need to be patient for a few months?