An update on Google's feature-phone crawling and indexing
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Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Limited mobile devices,
"feature-phones",
require a special form of markup or a transcoder for web content. Most websites don't provide
feature-phone-compatible content in WAP/WML any more. Given these developments, we've made changes
in how we crawl feature-phone content (note: these changes don't affect smartphone content):
We've retired the feature-phone Googlebot: We won't be using the feature-phone
user agents for crawling for search going forward.
Use "handheld" link annotations for dynamic serving of feature-phone content:
Some sites provide content for feature-phones through dynamic serving, based on the user's
user agent. To understand this configuration, make sure your desktop and smartphone pages have
a self-referential alternate URL link for handheld (feature-phone) devices:
This is a change from our previous guidance of only using the vary: user-agent
HTTP header. We've updated our documentation on
making feature-phone pages
accordingly. We hope adding this link element is possible on your side, and thank you for your
help in this regard. We'll continue to show feature-phone URLs in Search when we can recognize
them, and when they're appropriate for users.
We're retiring feature-phone tools in Search Console: Without the
feature-phone Googlebot, special sitemaps extensions for feature-phone, the Fetch as Google
feature-phone options, and feature-phone crawl errors are no longer needed. We continue to
support
sitemaps and other sitemap
extensions (such as for videos or
Google News), as well as the other
Fetch as Google
options in
Search Console.
We've worked to make these changes as minimal as possible. Most websites don't serve feature-phone
content, and wouldn't be affected. If your site has been providing feature-phone content, we thank
you for your help in bringing the Internet to feature-phone users worldwide!
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],[],[[["Google has retired its feature-phone Googlebot and will no longer crawl for feature-phone content using dedicated user agents."],["Websites providing content for feature-phones through dynamic serving should now use a \"handheld\" link annotation on their desktop and smartphone pages for Google to properly recognize it."],["Feature-phone specific tools in Google Search Console, such as sitemap extensions and fetch as Google options for feature-phones, have been retired."],["These changes primarily impact websites that actively serve content to feature-phone users, with most websites unaffected due to the decline in feature-phone usage."]]],["Google has retired the feature-phone Googlebot and will no longer use feature-phone user agents for crawling. Sites dynamically serving feature-phone content should use \"handheld\" link annotations with self-referential alternate URLs. Feature-phone tools, including sitemap extensions and Fetch as Google options, are being retired from Search Console. Google will still show feature-phone URLs when recognized, and sitemaps for videos and news remain supported. These changes are for feature-phones and don't impact smartphones.\n"]]
