Missing Things in Google Chrome (from a Developer Standpoint)

So I’ve been testing Google Chrome yesterday. The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s indeed fast. I’ve visited the same pages I usually visit with Firefox and it loaded much quickly.

What’s good is that each tab runs as its own process, so if there’s something wrong with one tab, it won’t affect the other ones and crash the whole thing.

Now, I’ve noticed a few things missing from Google Chrome that will not allow it to be the web developer’s favorite web browser:

– No extensions: Ouch! Extensions aren’t available right now but according to Matt Cutts, they will be soon.

– No “Open File” : I’ve tried to open an HTML page located on my computer to see how it renders with Chrome, but couldn’t find this option. Or maybe I missed something?

– No support for RSS: Chrome doesn’t seem to have a built-in RSS reader nor a shortcut to subscribe to a site’s RSS feed like on Firefox, the usual orange icon located in the toolbar.

Google Webmaster Tools – New Mobile Crawl Error: “Document size too large”

Google Webmaster Tools has a Diagnostic section dedicated to Mobile Crawl Errors. Someone over at WebmasterWorld recently noticed a new warning that reported that two pages of his Non-mobile Web site were “too big for common mobile devices, with the error message “Document size too large”. ”

This feature seems very new, since it’s not documented unlike other features found in Google Webmaster Tools.

The author of the forum thread believes that the size threshold is somewhere between 21kB and 30.3kB.

Note that currently, the W3C recommends in its Mobile Web Best Practices that site owners keep their pages under 20kB so that anyone using a mobile browser can view them.

I hope Google will soon confirm us what is the size limit for a page to be accepted in its mobile web index, and if size has an influence on rankings…

Via SearchEngineRoundtable.

Introduction to GoogleBot Mobile: How does Google build its Mobile Sites Index?

When you use Google Search from your mobile phone, you see two kinds of web pages results: traditional web pages (the same ones that you’ll see from your desktop) and mobile web pages.

To build its index of mobile web sites, Google uses a different bot than the traditional GoogleBot. The bot, named Googlebot-Mobile, actually crawls any website it finds and if it is considered as mobile friendly, it will then be included in Google mobile web index.

So if your mobile site is linked from other sites (be it mobile sites or regular web sites), Googlebot-Mobile has probably already found it and it is included in its mobile web index.

If that’s not the case, you can create a Mobile Sitemap of your site and submit it via Google Webmaster Tools.

Now, regarding the crawl frequency of Google Mobile Bot, it is of course less frequent than the regular one. While Googlebot usually comes to a website everyday, you can sometimes see Googlebot-Mobile not coming to back to your site before a period of 2 weeks.

The chart below is an example of the crawl rate made by Googlebot-Mobile on of the mobile sites that I manage over the last 4 months. As you can see, Googlebot-Mobile came more often in the recent months, but I don’t know if it’s a natural increase on their side or due to the site having more links (that’s the only factor that changed).

Click to enlarge:

googlebot mobile crawl rate

Mobile site owners should be aware of Googlebot-Mobile’s user agent. In fact, it behaves as a mobile phone, because sometimes only accesses made via a mobile phone are allowed to a site (for example, you sometimes can’t log on to a mobile web site from your PC) Google has chosen to identify its mobile bot as a cell phone.

Googlebot-Mobile’s full user agent is currently this one:

Nokia6820/2.0 (4.83) Profile/MIDP-1.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

As you can see, it behaves as a Nokia 6820, so you will need to remove this user agent in your mobile visits report to make sure you only count those made by real mobile phone users.

Do YouTube Pages Get Special Treatment in Google Mobile Search?

If you’re doing SEO for mobile sites, you may have noticed recently that Youtube mobile pages are all over the place in Google Mobile search engine results (mobile web). For any kind of query typed, you’ll see one or more Youtube links in the first result page. And very often, these Youtube videos are not relevant at all.

Check out the search results for the query “soulja boy” for example. (or view a screenshot here)

See that? Does Google think that people only want to see videos from their mobile?

I think that it’s a good thing that Google decided to include links to videos in its mobile search results, but having that many links to videos is not relevant at all. If people are looking for mobile web pages, they’ll have to do several clicks to find them, which is not helping the mobile user experience at all.

I hope that Google is aware of this situation and is trying to improve the quality of its mobile search results.

Mobile Web: Bango Offers a Way to Track Unique Visitors

Since I started doing Mobile SEO about 2 years ago, the main problem that I’ve encountered in my duties was that there’s no way to identify unique visitors when it comes to mobile surfing.

Indeed, as opposed to the desktop Web, where cookies or IP addresses (sometimes combined with user agents for better accuracy) are used to identify unique visitors, it’s another story with the mobile Web. Cookies aren’t supported by all phones and IP addresses aren’t unique to each end user, but it’s the one belonging to the WAP gateway used when you surf from your cell phone.

Today, Bango, a leading provider of mobile billing solutions and also of a mobile analytics suite announced today that it is the first company to provide an accurate unique visitor count.

This may sound surprising, but here’s how Bango explains how it works:

For each individual that clicks on an ad or browses a site, a privacy protected Bango User ID is created, compiled through sophisticated WAP gateway profiling, data from browser analysis, session information and network interactions. This unique user ID enables Bango to distinguish between new and repeat users and therefore quantify precisely the number of unique visitors.

Bango is close to many mobile phone carriers so it managed to work something out with them to profile users. But one thing that I’m not sure of is if this feature works with any carrier…I’ll ask this to Bango when I get a chance.

You can try Bango Analytics here.

Local Mobile Search: Google Launches User Reviews

When you just arrive in a new town and are looking for a good restaurant, the only way for most people is to use their cell phone and call a local directory, or use a search engine.

But besides finding a name and a location for the type of restaurant you’re looking for, these services won’t give you more information about the place.

To avoid possible disappointments, it’d be good to have reviews and ratings of the businesses you’ve found via a mobile search engine.

Google has recently enabled users to write reviews of businesses from their mobile phone.

If you go to Google from your cell and search for a business, then click on it, you’ll see a link to write a review about it and also to rate it (1-5 stars).
google mobile search reviews local search

google mobile reviews

This is a really nice feature, it allows people to easily and quickly get reviews about a business and then decide if they want to go there or not.

Via Google Mobile Blog.

Google using offline marketing in China to promote its mobile search engine

Google China is apparently using an offline marketing campaign to recruit new users for its mobile search engine. DWGoogle.cn has posted some photos of outdoor advertisements located in the subway station of Guangzhou.

Google seems to have chosen this area of China because the cost of Internet data is the lowest there, so people are more likely to surf from their mobile phones.

Via China Web 2.0

Yahoo! Mobile Search: Potential To Reach 600 Million Users

Yahoo announced on Tuesday that its mobile search service will be offered by six more telecom companies in Asia. It has reached 60 partnerships so far which represents a potential user base of 600 million subscribers. (Source: Reuters)

Considering that over 3.3 billion people in the world own a mobile phone (in 2007), that means that Yahoo! has the immediate potential to reach almost 20% of the world’s mobile users.