When To Fetch As Desktop OR Mobile In Search Console

Many bloggers and webmasters are still confused about whether to go for Mobile or Desktop when Fetching to Request Indexing using Google Webmaster Tool.

If you have ever asked the question, Should I Fetch as Desktop or as Mobile: Smartphone on Google Search Console then this article is strictly for you.

Generally, Fetching as Desktop doesn’t have any advantage over Fetching as Mobile. On the other hand, fetching as Mobile doesn’t make you rank higher than fetching as Desktop. However, there is a situation where you need to us both.

Now, Knowingly or Unknowingly, directly or indirectly, you may have blocked either Desktop Google bots or Mobile Google bots from crawling your site. For that, it is good that you fetch as Mobile and Desktop once in a while to be sure you are not blocking Googlebots.

You may be wondering, how do I block Googlebots from crawling my blog? It is easy. Use your robots.txt file to block robots. And to confirm whether you are blocking bots, make use of Google’s robots.txt tester under “Crawl” in your search Console.

Hope I have been able to convince you that using Fetch as Mobile is not better than Fetching as Desktop and vice versa.

Recommended: How to properly do onpage seo 

In the past, Google has warned against blocking Googlebot from crawling specific aspects of your website, and now the warning has been extended to mobile sites. Blocking Googlebot for Phones will have a negative effect on the snippet display for your website in the mobile SERPs.

Note that you can submit some additional requests using the “Crawl this URL and its direct links” option, even after hitting the limit using the “Crawl only this URL” option in the old search console, so there must be a separate limit for both.

Finally, it is important to note that the New Google Search Console doesn’t allow you to choose whether to Fetch as Mobile or as Desktop. However, it will show you whether the page is Mobile friendly after you Fetch as Google under url inspection. You may want to continue reading how to Fetch as Google in the new search console here.

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