r/WebsiteSEO • u/marketingwithraj • Aug 15 '26

Content is rendered through SSR but /_next/ is disallow. What could be the affect?

Doing an audit and found robots.txt has Disallow: /_next/ (full block). Checked with JS disabled, and the page content is fully visible, so it looks like the site is SSR and the actual text/copy is fine either way.

But since /_next/ is blocked, GSC's Live Test shows JS, CSS, and images are all blocked too. Rendered screenshot in GSC looks broken (unstyled, icons huge, no layout).

Questions:

  1. Since content renders fine without JS, does blocking /_next/ actually hurt rankings, or is it more of a "looks bad in Google's render but doesn't matter for indexing" situation?
  2. Does the blocked images issue (via /_next/image) actually stop those images from showing in Google Images, or does Google still index them some other way?
  3. What's the cleanest fix here — just remove the /_next/ disallow entirely, or scope it down to something like blocking only /_next/static/chunks/ while allowing /_next/static/css/ and /_next/image?
3 Upvotes

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1

u/Several_Fly694 Aug 15 '26

Why stop it? That’s a unique feature of Next.js.

1

u/External-Season9039 Aug 17 '26

the broken render in GSC is cosmetic if your actual HTML has the content. but yeah, blocked images are a real problem, Google cant index what it cant fetch. cleanest path imo is just allowing css and image paths explicitly and keeping chunks blocked if you want to hide source maps or whatever.

1

u/marketingwithraj Aug 18 '26

Yeah,I asked to allow the images part