Newrelic Resources Blocked from Google – how do you fix it?

Many websites have experienced issues with blocked resources from Newrelic in the past few weeks. Google Search Console report it as an error.

Even if you do not use the Newrelic service on your site you may get this error if you use third party components such as embedded videos from Vimeo.

But what is the problem and what can you do about it? In this post we will explain …

What is the problem with blocked resources?

It has always been considered good best practise in SEO not to block any resources, such as CSS and JavaScripts from Google and other major search engines.

In recent years it has become even more important. This is because Google is not just “eating code” but actually try to analyse what a page will look like when displayed to users.

In order to do this Google need access to all CSS and JavaScript files. If they are blocked from any resources they can not be sure how a page will display. This can have consequences for your indexing and ranking.

Even if the blocked file do not actually influence how your page look – as it is (in the cases we looked at) the case with the JS files blocked by Newrelic, it may give you problems because Google do not know this when they can’t see the file.

Search Console report blocked resources

In Google Search Console under Google Index -> Blocked Resources you can find a report that show which resources is blocked at your website.

Below you can see a report from a site we manage where Google have detected blocked JavaScript files served from Newrelic.

In this case the site is actually not using Newrelic but embed videos from Vimea that does.

How do you fix the blocked Newrelic resources problems

We have not been able to find a solution that you as an individual site owner can use to fix this. However, Newrelic is aware of the problem and it looks like it was not intentionally.

In this support thread Newrelic say it was likely an issue with a 3rd party data hosting service.

So far we have not identified any indexing or ranking problems with the pages that include blocked Newrelic resources. We hope Nerelic with fix this fast but until they do we will continue to monitor the affected pages closely. We recommend you do the same.

If you are a client of Newrelic we also recommend that you contact them to let them know how important it is to you that this is fixed as fast as possible.