Google Drops Support for Feature Phone Crawling and Crawl Reports

Google has announced that they will be dropping support for the feature phone crawling and crawling report from their search console. The reason behind this move seems to be the outdated nature of this feature.

Feature phones are the type pf phones which have the ability to access internet and have music playing features but still do not have the features of what qualifies to be a smartphone. In other words feature phones are largely text based with no animations or graphics and have limitations on viewing images and other advanced features that one can find an in smartphone.

No Crawling or Crawl Reports for Feature Phone

One the reason behind dropping support for this feature is that the present websites do not provide support for WAP/WML, it is a type of markup language that is used with mobiles using the WAP specifications. Google has confirmed that they are making changes only on the way feature phone contents are crawled and it would not have any effects on the way smartphone contents are crawled.

By dropping the feature phone crawl there is no more use for the crawl reports in the Google search console either hence it has also been dropped. Crawl report for feature phones used to show sitemap extensions, fetch feature and crawl error reports. With the latest update on the feature phone crawl removal webmaster will not be able to see those features in the search console anymore.

As more and more new technologies come into the fray older technologies gets outdated and we will continue to see Google embracing the new ones while outdating the older ones.