Google announced that it has expanded the Crawl Errors feature in Webmaster Tools to help webmasters identify pages on their sites that show smartphone crawl errors.
This is going to be of particular importance because Google recently made several ranking changes for sites not configured for smartphone users.
“Some smartphone-optimized websites are misconfigured in that they don’t show searchers the information they were seeking,” says Google Webmaster Trends analyst Pierre Far. “For example, smartphone users are shown an error page or get redirected to an irrelevant page, but desktop users are shown the content they wanted. Some of these problems, detected by Googlebot as crawl errors, significantly hurt your website’s user experience and are the basis of some of our recently-announced ranking changes for smartphone search results.”
The feature will include server errors, “not found” errors and soft 404s, faulty redirects and blocked URLs.
“Fixing any issues shown in Webmaster Tools can make your site better for users and help our algorithms better index your content,” says Far.
Google’s Matt Cutts recently asked what users would like to see Google add to Webmaster Tools in the coming year. Some will no doubt be able to cross one thing off their list now.
Image: Google
