Anyone who has ever tried to make a site work understands how frustrating it can be to get it to function the same way across all releases of all browsers on all operating systems. These days, it’s even worse. Not only do you have to worry about all of the different ways a person can view your site on the computer, you have to try and take into account the myriad of ways they can view your site from a mobile device. At this point, there are thousands of phones on the market and no two are exactly the same. It’s been a real headache for the webmasters of the world, but this week, Google is making it a little easier by introducing a special addition to the crawl errors page that Googlebot-mobilebot discovers when it crawls as a mobile device.
According to Pierre Far, a well known trends analyst, there is now a great deal of information available regarding crawl errors for smartphones. These include server errors where the Googlebot is served an HTTP error status code when it crawls a page, not found and soft 404 error, faulty redirects (especially ones that direct mobile users to non-relevant pages), and urls that are blocked in robots.txt specifically for mobile.
These aren’t the only errors, but they are the major ones. To see the complete list, you don’t have to wait at all. The program is already live. Simply log on to your Google Webmaster account, and view the Crawl Errors under your Crawl submenu. Once you’re there, you can select the smartphone tab to view the mobile related crawl errors found on your site.
If you’re the webmaster, we suggest doing this right away. If you’re not the webmaster, shoot them this blog in an email in case they aren’t aware that this service is now being offered.