Google Starts Indexing with a Smartphone Googlebot

Google has announced a very interesting and major change in the way it indexes websites. The search engine has started using a mobile Googlebot with a smartphone user agent along with the regular one to start indexing websites that serve custom versions to smartphone users.

"Today we are happy to announce that Googlebot-Mobile now crawls with a smartphone user-agent in addition to its previous feature phone user-agents," Google wrote.

"This is to increase our coverage of smartphone content and to provide a better search experience for smartphone users," it explained.

The idea is to start surfacing smartphone-optimized content better and to also improve search results on smartphones. This improves the experience for users, which get results more suited for the mobile web, but also for websites that took the time to create dedicated versions.

For example, when the smartphone Googlebot-Mobile hits a page that redirects smartphone users to a new URL, Google will start using that URL in mobile search results instead, to save users time.