Google Will Be Penalizing Non-Mobile Ready Sites

Step 1- Go check if your site is (or is not) mobile ready below:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Of course Google search is just one search engine, but definitely THE one that likely delivers most of your “organic” visitors (organic visitors are the ones that naturally find your posts and pages when searching versus you having to pay for that traffic).

There are many other ways to get traffic, such as Facebook, ads, other social media networks like YouTube videos, etc… So you will have additional, and also traditional options. But it sure is cool to have organic traffic so if there is anything you can do to prepare your site then you might give it a try.

If your site checks out OK then you are good to go!

If your site does not check out then it will offer a rabbit hole of suggestions to fix it.
And when I say rabbit hole, I am talking Alice in Wonderland has got nothing on this one! LOL

I will share what was wrong with mine here and if this is what is wrong with yours, then you are in luck and I will save you 24 hours of sobbing, figuring out WHO you are gonna pay to fix this and how much it will cost plus several glasses of wine. Turns out it wasn't too hard to fix, just hard to find out HOW to fix it. Ironically I “Googled” a few things and got it fixed :-).

Take a look at the error I got below and see if it matches what you got. Specifically in my case it is calling out an error with the robots.txt file. I attempted to first edit my robots.txt and also remove it altogether (since you don't actually need one UNLESS you want to disallow something). But neither one of these steps made a difference. This is, I read, because WordPress actually adds a virtual robots file that you can't edit (what?!). So, instead this is what I had to do.

Step 2- Install this plugin called WP robots txt.

Go to the admin menu Settings -> Reading options

Scroll to find that plugin update which will show you what your robots.txt file now looks like

Change it to say exactly this:

User-agent: Googlebot
Allow:/

Save the changes. Go re-test the site and that should do it!

To re-test, simply run that URL on the link above again and unless there were other errors, then you are all set!

I hope that helps you solve all of it, or maybe just that part with the robots.txt file.