Smartphone Crawl Errors Added To Google Webmaster Tools

Google announced last night a new feature within Google Webmaster Tools specific for tracking crawl errors on smartphones.

There is now a new filter within the crawl errors section of Google Webmaster Tools for Smartphone errors.

Pierre Far, who is the face of Google for smartphone webmaster topics, shared onGoogle+ that what is provided in this report are the "common mistakes we see in smartphone-optimized sites." Now only do these errors hurt your "site's user experience" Pierre said they can "affect your site's ranking."

Here is a screen shot of the new filter in crawl errors within Webmaster Tools for Smartphone errors:

Some of the errors we share include:

• Server errors: A server error is when Googlebot got an HTTP error status code when it crawled the page.
• Not found errors and soft 404s: A page can show a "not found" message to Googlebot, either by returning an HTTP 404 status code or when the page is detected as a soft error page.
• Faulty redirects: A faulty redirect is a smartphone-specific error that occurs when a desktop page redirects smartphone users to a page that is not relevant to their query. A typical example is when all pages on the desktop site redirect smartphone users to the homepage of the smartphone-optimized site.
• Blocked URLs: A blocked URL is when the site's robots.txt explicitly disallows crawling by Googlebot for smartphones. Typically, such smartphone-specific robots.txt disallow directives are erroneous. You should investigate your server configuration if you see blocked URLs reported in Webmaster Tools.

Fixing any issues shown in Webmaster Tools can make your site better for users and help our algorithms better index your content. You can learn more about how to build smartphone websitesand how to fix common errors.