After dropping the ‘Content Keywords’ from Search Console, Google has now removed the support for “feature phone” and the crawl reports as well. Feature phones are those phones that allow you to access the Internet but lack the advanced functionality of a smartphone.
Most websites these days don’t serve feature phones hence this move wouldn’t really make an impact. Elucidating in the blog post, John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google said, “Most websites don’t provide feature-phone-compatible content in WAP/WML anymore. Given these developments, we’ve made changes in how we crawl feature-phone content”.
Google said that it won’t be using the feature-phone user-agents anymore for crawling to take the search forward and hence users won’t be able to see it in their log.
Those who use feature phone support for a website should use a self-referential alternate URL link.
<link rel=”alternate” media=”handheld” href=”[current page URL]” />
Site-Map Extensions for Feature Phone and Feature-Phone Crawl Errors Too Retires:
Since the search engine is doing away with feature phone Google bot, sitemap extensions for feature phones and its crawl errors report would no longer be continued. However, Google will continue to support sitemaps, sitemap extensions for videos or Google News.
Sunil Prajapati
He is an alternative medicine graduate and qualified Web Technologies professional. He has nearly a decade of experience in clinical practice, healthcare IT and digital marketing. Sunil’s earlier ventures include offline and online applications for healthcare industry. After his family and son, he loves most fitness, food and reading. He is looking forward to bettering his personal best time in completing the half marathon.
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