An update on Google’s feature-phone crawling and indexing

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):

1. We’ve retired the feature-phone Googlebot: We won’t be using the feature-phone
   user agents for crawling for search going forward.

2. 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.

3. 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!

For any questions, you can drop by our
Webmaster Help Forums!

Posted by
John Mueller, Webmaster
Trends Analyst, Google Switzerland