Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 7:20 AM
Webmaster level: All
With the number of smartphone users rapidly rising, we’re seeing more and more websites providing content specifically designed to be browsed on smartphones. Today we are happy to announce that Googlebot-Mobile now crawls with a smartphone user-agent in addition to its previous feature phone user-agents. This is to increase our coverage of smartphone content and to provide a better search experience for smartphone users.
Here are the main user-agent strings that Googlebot-Mobile now uses:
-
Feature phones Googlebot-Mobile:
- SAMSUNG-SGH-E250/1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 UP.Browser/6.2.3.3.c.1.101 (GUI) MMP/2.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
- DoCoMo/2.0 N905i(c100;TB;W24H16) (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Smartphone Googlebot-Mobile:
- Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
The content crawled by smartphone Googlebot-Mobile will be used primarily to improve the user experience on mobile search. For example, the new crawler may discover content specifically optimized to be browsed on smartphones as well as smartphone-specific redirects.
One new feature we’re also launching that uses these signals is Skip Redirect for Smartphone-Optimized Pages. When we discover a URL in our search results that redirects smartphone users to another URL serving smartphone-optimized content, we change the link target shown in the search results to point directly to the final destination URL. This removes the extra latency the redirect introduces leading to a saving of 0.5-1 seconds on average when visiting landing page for such search results.
Since all Googlebot-Mobile user-agents identify themselves as a specific kind of mobile, please treat each Googlebot-Mobile request as you would a human user with the same phone user-agent. This, and other guidelines are described in our previous blog post and they still apply, except for those referring to smartphones which we are updating today. If your site has treated Googlebot-Mobile specially based on the fact that it only crawls with feature phone user-agents, we strongly recommend reviewing this policy and serving the appropriate content based on the Googlebot-Mobile’s user-agent, so that both your feature phone and smartphone content will be indexed properly.
If you have more questions, please ask on our Webmaster Help forums.
10 comments:
Hi there,
I'm still a beginner in mobile SEO and I need some clarifications regarding the robots.txt file.
We launched a mobile website a month ago, which does not have the exact same content as our official website.
When writing the robots.txt file, I haven't specified "googlebot-mobile" because the user agent was not crawling smartphone websites yet.
Does the change mentionned in the post above mean that I now have to modify the robots.txt file in order to include googlebot-mobile (in addition to googlebot) ?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Z
I've found that often a company's mobile site doesn't provide the same level of comprehensive content as their non-mobile site. In these same cases, it's often impossible to visit the non-mobile site from a smartphone because of user-agent configurations. Will Google ever provide a "skip to full site" functionality in snippets for mobile searches? There have been several cases where I can remember the exact content I want to access from the non-mobile site, but am unable to from a smartphone or other mobile device..
When you refer to "search results", is this applicable to both the desktop and mobile versions?
So does this mean that I need to start building links to my smart phone website to get it rank now?
Thank goodness. I'm sick of relying on sites to deliver their smartphone sites correctly. If Google can drop me on the right smartphone page instead of a desktop page that may or may not redirect me, all the better. Here's hoping it starts changing smartphone search results quickly.
I'm glad to see that Google appears to be abandoning its previous position that smartphones should be directed to desktop websites.
Hopefully this now means that when I search from my smartphone, Google is going to return, or at least highlight, sites with mobile-friendly content.
Hi, I've posted a related question at forum
http://goo.gl/wSYkZ
thanks
It's time to start optimizing our website because of this update. I need to improve my Wordpress site so that it will be compatible again to mobiles.
Thank you for this update.
I have to agree with Jonathan. I have so many problems with certain webs and its content. Why the heck are they providing half services to us?
Anyway, I am trying the new google wallet payments and till now everything worked perfectly. So at least some advance. What do you think about mobile payments? They are described for example here .
Will googlebot-mobile use different accept headers when crawling as smartphone and feature phones?
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