Google Updates Googlebot Smartphone UA From April 18

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Google Updates Googlebot Smartphone UA From April 18

engine

6:10 pm on Mar 16, 2016 (gmt 0)

According to google, the update is because the renderer can better understand "newer web technologies."

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12F70 Safari/600.1.4 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) (Current Googlebot smartphone user-agent)

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) (Googlebot smartphone user-agent starting from April 18, 2016)

[webmasters.googleblog.com...]

keyplyr

7:14 pm on Mar 16, 2016 (gmt 0)

Thanks engine

Just a FYI to all: these are the new UAs Googlebot will be using to check for cloaking & mobile friendly and *not* the new UAs for the actual user-end phones.

not2easy

8:21 pm on Mar 16, 2016 (gmt 0)

I noticed yesterday that both "Current" and "Updated" Smartphone UAs are available in the GSC under Fetch as Google and wondered about that. I am hoping the Updated version will recognize that the "Blocked Resources" they report are blocked by Google's robots.txt and not something i can do much about.

keyplyr

9:12 am on Mar 17, 2016 (gmt 0)

I am hoping the Updated version will recognize that the "Blocked Resources" they report are blocked by Google's robots.txt

No such luck :(

The "Mobile: Smartphone - Upcoming" gives the same GSC report as the "Mobile: Smartphone - Current" for one of my pages that uses Adsense. I'd like to know the actual difference.

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js Script Blocked Low robots.txt
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js Script Blocked Low robots.txt

lucy24

11:32 pm on Apr 14, 2016 (gmt 0)

the update is because the renderer can better understand "newer web technologies."

I suppose it's no use asking what the capabilities of "the renderer" have to do with the UA string any given robot chooses to send. I mean, it's not as if there is an actual human at the far end of every Googlebot visit, evaluating what their device sees.

keyplyr

11:45 pm on Apr 14, 2016 (gmt 0)

You mean somewhere at the Googleplex, at the end of a long dark hallway, there's a door to an office where the name plate sitting on the desk says "The Renderer?"