December 20th, 2011
Googlebot Now Crawls Smartphone Sites
Google recently announced that its Googlebot – Mobile now crawls the mobile web with a smartphone user-agent, in addition to its existing feature-phone user-agent.
“With the number of smartphone users rapidly rising, we’re seeing more and more websites providing content specifically designed to be browsed on smartphones,” says Google software engineer Yoshikiyo Kato. In response, Google has changed the way smartphone content is indexed.
Whenever Google makes a change to the way they crawl the web, it’s a big deal in the web marketing world because chances are your sites gets between 25 – 65 % of traffic from Google.
Just like when Google announced that Adwords Quality Score was affected by mobile, we wanted to find out what the new smartphone crawler means for our customers.
We did a little digging and talked to Peter McLachlan, Mobify’s chief solution architect, with a particular regard to search engine optimization (SEO).
“We’ve always worked hard to make sure that Mobify provides a great user experience and are happy to see Google is focussed on the same thing,” he stated. ”A key component of a great user experience is something comprehensive that just works for everyone. That’s why we’re so focussed on the One Web solution – one URL for the website that adapts to desktop, mobile, and tablet.”
“The One Web approach also means search ranking is never divided between a desktop site and a mobile site. As a result, Mobify-powered sites reach and stay at the top of search rankings.”
Now, if your website treats smartphones differently from featurephones or desktop users, Google will be able to index results separately. This means:
- Smartphone users will automatically be given a link to the smartphone optimized page in their Google search results.
- The direct link removes the extra latency from a smartphone redirect, shaving off between 0.5 – 1 seconds.
- Search results are now dependent on device, as well as search terms.
We’re excited to see Google paying more and more attention to mobile and are excited to see what they do next to help improve the mobile experience.
Mobify has been all about mobile optimization and we’re excited to see Google going in the same direction as us, managing search and ad results based on mobile experience, and starting to rank results differently if the search is on a mobile device. The best way to get great search rankings is to stay focussed on great user experiences across all ways people are searching.
