Mediarun Search Marketing News

Launch of Googlebot-Mobile

By Matthew Kynaston

December 16th 2011

Search Engine Optimisation News

After much anticipation, Google have finally announced the launch of a new crawler “Googlebot Mobile” which crawls mobile sites specifically with a smartphone user agent.

It has done this to optimise their indexing of mobile sites in recognition of the growing number of sites and increasing levels of search traffic coming from smartphones.

Over the last year there has been a phenomenal increase in mobile internet usage. It is believed that nearly 50%? of internet usage in the UK is coming directly from smartphones.

With that in mind Google has decided to launch a smartphone specific user agent string; in a nutshell it will mean users receive an improved experience from their search experiences. The user agent will enable the gathering of more data and consequently present those web pages (that have been enabled for smartphones only) to be displayed to the correct type of device. This means that as a webmaster creating a store locator, for example, can code it to cater for different devices and Google will in turn use the learning’s of the bot to display one version or the other depending on the device.

Example: A Blackberry curve device will have a much more limited functionality than an iPhone4s, so why compromise a great tool for your users and avoid alienation?

If anything this reinforces the message that smartphone friendly sites will get a much more thorough look by Google.

Googlebot-Mobile will be crawling to identify mobile sites and discover smartphone-specific redirects, all with the aim of optimising mobile user experience. This is part of the new feature “Skip Redirect for Smartphones-Optimized Pages”, this actions when a URL is discovered which redirects users to a mobile site, Googlebot-mobile will change the link on the search results to the destination URL, affectively taking out the diversion.

If you know Google, you know they are obsessed with time. This “skip redirect” feature is set to save mobile users up to one second of latency of having to wait to be redirected to a mobile site from an original URL.

This is a big break-through in mobile online search marketing. It’s imperative for webmasters to optimize their sites for mobile users, and this is one great step to achieving that.

To find out about the performance solution we can offer you and your business, speak to one of our consultants on +44 (0)8009 550 176 or contact us.