More and more Internet users are using smartphones to browse the web. In July of 2011 The Pew Research Center issued a report titled “Smartphone Adoption and Usage” (Download Full Report as PDF). It found that over 85% of smartphone owners access the internet or email on their smartphone. Over 65% do so on a typical day.
One quarter of smartphone owners say that they mostly go online using their phone, rather than with a computer and roughly one third of these “cell mostly” users do not have a high-speed home broadband connection.
In recognition of this change in browsing habits Google has enhanced its mobile webcrawler to act like a smartphone to better index websites that are crafted to work well with these newer devices.
With the number of smartphone users rapidly rising, we’re seeing more and more websites providing content specifically designed to be browsed on smartphones. 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. This is to increase our coverage of smartphone content and to provide a better search experience for smartphone users.
One new feature we’re also launching that uses these signals is Skip Redirect for Smartphone-Optimized Pages. When we discover a URL in our search results that redirects smartphone users to another URL serving smartphone-optimized content, we change the link target shown in the search results to point directly to the final destination URL. This removes the extra latency the redirect introduces leading to a saving of 0.5-1 seconds on average when visiting landing page for such search results.
Is your website friendly to mobile visitors? With smartphone use growing, the online face of your business needs to be ready. Unlimited Priorities can help you by providing a fresh look at your online presence and solid advice for practical changes.
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