Google has announced that its mobile crawler now has a user-agent that’s specific to smartphones. The company has already had a user-agent that targets feature phones.

The new Smartphone Googlebot-Mobile user agent is:

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)

As part of today’s announcement, Google is also introducing a feature called “Skip Redirect for Smartphone-Optimized Pages.” Here’s how the blog post describes it:

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.

With this new smartphone-specific user-agent, Google is advising webmasters to make sure they serve appropriate content for each mobile crawler.

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Mobile | Google: SEO | Search Marketing: Mobile | SEO: Mobile Search

About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGee

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