Mobile Googlebot vs Desktop Googlebot - GWT reports - Crawl errors
-
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?
-
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
-
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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My last site crawl shows over 700 404 errors all with void(0 added to the ends of my posts/pages.
Hello, My last site crawl shows over 700 404 errors all with void(0 added to the ends of my posts/pages. I have contacted my theme company but not sure what could have done this. Any ideas? The original posts/pages are still correct and working it just looks like it did duplicates and added void(0 to the end of each post/page. Questions: There is no way to undo this correct? Do I have to do a redirect on each of these? Will this hurt my rankings and domain authority? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, Wade
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neverenoughmusic.com0 -
Http vs. https - duplicate content
Hi I have recently come across a new issue on our site, where https & http titles are showing as duplicate. I read https://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-and-http-and-https however, am wondering as https is now a ranking factor, blocked this can't be a good thing? We aren't in a position to roll out https everywhere, so what would be the best thing to do next? I thought about implementing canonicals? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Possible problem with new site (GWT no queries/very low index vs. submitted)
Hi everyone, I recently launched a new website for a small business loan company in the Dallas area. The site has been live for roughly a month and a half. I submitted everything to GWT as usual, including my sitemap. I am not sure what's going on with the site, as there is no activity from GWT in the impressions or queries. The submit vs. index is 24/3 (and hasn't moved). Also the queries graph on the overview stops at 3/18/2015... On another note, when I go to Crawl > Sitemaps, it shows that there were pages indexed during the month of march and then on April 3 it drops from 17 to 2 and never increases. Google says there are no errors or issues found, but I feel like there's something wrong. When I do site:, my URLs do pop up which makes me believe there's just a problem with my GWT. With that being said, I'm not happy THINKING there's something wrong. I need to actually know what the problem is. The only thing I can think of that I have done is purchase SSL for the site, but when I search what pages are indexed using www. it shows all the HTTPS URLS, so that would tell me that the site is getting indexed without a problem? Does anyone have a clue as to what might be happening? I will attach some screen shots so that you can get a better idea... KQ2366i D5xBNZf mF7kkgW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jameswesleyhunt0 -
Google Cookies - Organic vs PPC visitors
I am not a developer - I am researching this for our team, so please, be gentle... I am also not quite sure how to ask this question. We want to serve up custom pages for visitors from Google organic. We aren't doing anything underhanded - the pages will have very small differences that will not affect our rankings and won't land us in Google jail. When a Google visitor hits one of our pages, what specific piece of data are we looking for to determine: a. It's a Google visitor b. He/she came from organic results. I need to tell our developers to look for something that triggers the custom page. It's the same data that Google Analytics uses to trigger the appropriate visitor type. Please pardon my naivete.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
HTTPS entire domain Vs. one URL
Long time no Moz! Ive been away with some server related issues, installing an AD at the company I work for, but I'm back. Our SSL cert just expired and I'm trying to determine the pros and cons of making an entire site SSL vs just the URL. Our previous set up was just a single domain. I know Google has hinted toward SSL preference, and I know its a little early to know for certain how much that's going to help, but I just wanted to know what everybody thought? It expired yesterday, so I have to do something. And we lost our previous credentials so I can't just renew the old one. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Desktop & Mobile Sitemaps Covering The Same Ground - Any Benefit To Having Both?
If my URL structure is the same for the desktop and mobile experience, is there any benefit to creating a mobile sitemap, considering that the sitemap for our desktop site covers the same URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edmundsseo0 -
Convertinh Website for Mobile ?
Dear All, My website (a rental website where you can hire anything online) currently has approx 1/3 of it's traffic from mobile devices , ipads, iphones, blackberry , HTC etc etc. The bounce rate is slightly higher for these at 47% but we have not optimised our site to be mobile friendly as yet. This is something I want to do. Do we just make it fit well into a 320 pixel screen or should we do new wire frames etc and essentially make a cut down website just for mobile. One of the things I know we will do is to make it pick up someones location and retrieve results nearest to them but is there any other do's and don'ts when going down the mobile route ?. I seem to find conflicting infomation when researching this , one example is about using a different url for mobile , one site says it gets you more traffic whilst another says don't use a different url. Also does anyone know of any good tips or sites where I can get some useful info about making the site Mobile Friendly >? thanks Sarah.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
What reports should I run, what else can i improve?
Hi, I ran a full Ranking analysis report for "empresa diseño web" for Google Mexico. From what I could see, my site has better metrics in most items than many of the top 10 sites for those keywords. What other reports should I run in order to gain some insights on how to improve on my site and improve my position? Thanks and regards, Rosario
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | prointernacional0