Googlebot smartphone redirect

Googlebot smartphone redirect - If a page has internal and external outgoing links to redirecting URLs, it’s returning 3xx (301, 302, etc.) HTTP status codes standing for redirection. This issue means that the page does not exist on a permanent or temporary basis. It appears on most of the popular web browsers, usually caused by a misconfigured website. However, there are some steps you can take to ensure the issue isn’t on your side. You can find more details about redirecting URLs by reading the Google Search Central overview. In this article, we’ll go over how you can fix the Googlebot smartphone redirect error on your web browser. Problem :

We are using two different domains for our desktop and mobile websites.
"www.x.com" and "m.x.com".

The users with mobile devices ending on "www.x.com" are (302) redirected to "m.x.com"

I have just found out when reviewing the Mobile Usability issues in GSC that "Googlebot smartphone" sees the desktop site, even though the alternative links for smaller screens are already defined.

We can easily add 302 redirects for "Googlebot smartphone" but I don't know if it's a wise thing to do. I'm worried that different Google bots will receieve different status messages and content from the same url and no idea about the consequences.

The question is
Shall I do 302 redirects when the user agent is "Googlebot smartphone" while other google bots will remain on the desktop site, or can this actually hurt our ranking?

Note: We have already in place
- Canonical Urls in mobile website pointing to desktop url
- Alternative Urls in destop website pointing to mobile urls << Google seem to ignore this when assessing the usability.

Solution :

I found the answer here : https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/separate-urls

Automatic redirection
When a website is configured to serve desktop and mobile browsers using different URLs, webmasters may want to automatically redirect users to the URL that best serves them. If your website uses automatic redirection, be sure to treat all Googlebots just like any other user-agent and redirect them appropriately.

We hope that this article has helped you resolve the redirects, googlebot, googlebot-mobile error in your web browsers. Enjoy browsing the internet uninterrupted!