Mobile Googlebot vs Desktop Googlebot - GWT reports - Crawl errors

[Carla_Dawson]

Hi Everyone,

I have a very specific SEO question. I am doing a site audit and one of the crawl reports is showing tons of 404's for the "smartphone" bot and with very recent crawl dates. If our website is responsive, and we do not have a mobile version of the website I do not understand why the desktop report version has tons of 404's and yet the smartphone does not. I think I am not understanding something conceptually.

I think it has something to do with this little message in the Mobile crawl report.

"Errors that occurred only when your site was crawled by Googlebot (errors didn't appear for desktop)."

If I understand correctly, the "smartphone" report will only show URL's that are not on the desktop report. Is this correct?

[iPullRank]

Hey Carla,

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying with:

"one of the crawl reports is showing tons of 404's for the "smartphone" bot and with very recent crawl dates. If our website is responsive, and we do not have a mobile version of the website I do not understand why the desktop report version has tons of 404's and yet the smartphone does not. I think I am not understanding something conceptually."

You say that the smartphone bot is seeing tons of 404s and the desktop report is showing tons of 404s, but the smartphone does not. If you can clarify that, I can probably better answer your question.

However, the answer is likely that Google may decide not to crawl URLs that it has already identified as 404s in one context. That is to say if they identify URLs on the mobile device as 404s they will know not to crawl them if they encounter them on desktop and vice versa.

-Mike

[Carla_Dawson]

Ok I forgot to add something to this as well. Why would the URLS show up on the smartphone report if they are not on the desktop report? Afterall a 404 from either device is still a 404?

Thanks