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User Agent

Definition

A user agent is a string of text sent by a browser to identify itself and provide information about its capabilities to web servers. The user agent string typically includes the browser type and version, operating system, and device type.

Web servers use the user agent to determine how to serve content appropriately for that browser and device. Crawlers like Googlebot also have user agents that web servers can identify.

User Agent Relevance For SEO

Understanding user agents is important for SEO for a few key reasons:

  • Web servers can serve different content to different devices and browsers. Analyzing user agent data can help identify opportunities for mobile or responsive web optimization.
  • The robots.txt file uses user agents to control what parts of a site crawlers can access. This allows selective blocking of parts of a site.
  • Cloaking, or serving different content to users vs crawlers, violates Google’s webmaster guidelines. However, identifying Googlebot’s user agent string allows appropriate content serving without cloaking.
  • On complex SEO setups, specially when dealing with JavaScript SEO and dynamic rendering, dealing with user agents is crucial.

User Agent Best Practices for SEO

Here are a few best practices with regard to User Agents for SEO:

  • Avoid Redirecting: Use responsive web design to optimize for all devices rather than redirecting based on user agent.
  • User-friendly content: Always create content that is both user- and crawler-friendly, ensuring that search engine bots can easily read and understand your site content.
  • Monitor bot activity: Keep an eye on which bots are crawling your site, how often, and what they’re accessing. You can use this information to optimize your site’s crawl budget.
  • Avoid cloaking: Ensure you are not showing different content to search engines than you show to users, a practice known as cloaking, which is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.