Feature Phones for Large Websites

Forum Moderators: not2easy

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Feature Phones for Large Websites

When you can't possibly build HTML for every page

Fiver

3:23 pm on Sep 16, 2015 (gmt 0)

Hi Folks,

Is there a best practice for when you have a LARGE website, which is configured pretty darn well for mobile, smartphones, tablets and feature phones - but you can't possibly build out html for every tiny section of the site for feature phones?

Problem is Google keeps crawling these nether regions of the site and we have traditionally served 404s for feature phones in these sections, but that's leading to a build of of hundreds of thousands of 404s being served to googlebot.

we could, instead
1) serve a 200ok and a message saying 'page not available on your device', but that's a soft 404 and not a perfect user experience, we don't want these pages ranking on mobile and attracting feature phone users
2) serve 200ok and the touch version of the site - but again, this could crash a lot of feature phones and cause a bad experience
3) just let the 404 barrage continue

Is there any agreed upon tactic here? I can't find anything on the greater internet. Mucho gracias!

not2easy

3:53 pm on Sep 16, 2015 (gmt 0)

404s don't hurt your site, it is a notification in case you were not aware of a problem. Just mark them as fixed so they don't keep piling up. First check a few to see if the URL exists somewhere (automatically generated?) and if not, just mark them fixed and make changes at your own pace. It is not the best user experience to not be able to access all your site, so you should allow feature phones access to all of it and they may or may not be able to use it very well but it is better than redirecting to a 404 based on device.

Avoid anything that serves a soft 404 those are worse for your site health than 404s.
Others may have more suggestions. De nada.

Fiver

4:47 pm on Sep 16, 2015 (gmt 0)

Thanks not2easy, I agree I am going to avoid any soft 404s - I know the old adage that 404s don't harm your site, but in my experience, once you start hitting seven figures of them, we've seen organic decline on related site sections - so I take that with a grain of salt, I think in extreme situations a lot of 404s is seen as a low quality indicator. This section is hitting 30 thousand 404s per day for googlebot (even though we don't link to them).

As I understand it now that googlbot standard is the smartphone crawler, I could technically block these sections for googlebot-mobile and it would only be blocking the feature-phone crawler. So that's another option.