Google drops their feature phone crawler & error report in Search Console

Google has announced they have dropped support for crawling the web as a feature phone and have also removed the crawl error reports in Google Search Console.

Google said that “most websites don’t provide feature-phone-compatible content in WAP/WML any more.” Google said that because of this change, they have “made changes in how we crawl feature-phone content.” This does not impact how Google crawls or indexes smartphone content, just feature phones. Feature phones are those old Nokia phones that let you access websites in a text-based interface.

Google won’t be using the feature-phone user-agents for crawling for search going forward. So you will no longer see those in your logs.

Which means that if you do have a feature phone support on your website, you need to use “handheld” link annotations for dynamic serving of feature-phone content. Here is what that code looks like:

<link rel="alternate" media="handheld" href="[current page URL]" />

You can learn more about that in the updated documentation at Google’s developer site.

Finally, since Google is no longer crawling the web as a feature-phone, the crawl error reports for feature phones has gone away. Google said, “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.”

Here is a before and after of that report. Notice the “feature phone” option is gone now:

Before:

Now:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.