Googles View On Responsive Design

[mediamole]

Hello,

Keep getting asked this by customers so thought make a general posting here.

Agreed there are many great benefits to Responsive Design from a sales point of view, but according to a recent response by Google to forum Q&A it has no great SEO benefits and will not boost rankings!!

Google Said:

“We do not rank responsive web design sites better than sites using other configurations (separate site for mobile or dynamic serving). […]

Google does not favor any particular configuration as long as the page(s) and all page assets are accessible to all Googlebot user-agents.”

More Info - See below:

https://productforums.google.com/for...JAQ/discussion

[fergusw]

Google Said:

“We do not rank responsive web design sites better than sites using other configurations (separate site for mobile or dynamic serving)

.....for now.

Google most definitely recommends responsive website design as the way to deliver your website to multiple devices, and given the proliferation of tablets, phones etc then this is pretty much the only way to build a website now.

It does also have an impact on SEO when compared to other mobile content delivery methods i.e. separate M-commerce site:

• It keeps your desktop and mobile content on a single URL, which is easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to and for Google’s algorithms to assign the indexing properties to your content.
• Google can discover your content more efficiently as we wouldn't need to crawl a page with the different Googlebot user agents to retrieve and index all the content.

See: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...martphone.html

Additionally we have also see Google playing with different ways to present responsive websites in its search results, particularly on tablet and phones.
This shows in various tests they have performed where a word or image for "mobile" or "tablet" appears against responsive websites. This visual aid looks to be coming online soon and will affect the behaviour of searchers, influencing which sites they might click over others.
e.g. http://googlesystem.blogspot.co.uk/2...martphone.html

So basically, responsive web design = good.

[mediamole]

I agree with all what you said. I've been rolling out responsive design myself over past few months as it has many business benefits for the customers as it extends their market reach.

My point was that I've had some customers being told Responsive Design is the sole purpose to SEO success to boost their rankings! which is not the case.

[fergusw]

Agreed Garry.
To say responsive design on it's own will boost rankings is slightly disingenuous. It potentially could be a benefit when directly compared to organic performance of an already non-responsive site that has a separate m-commerce site (taking organic performance for both into account) which then moved to responsive. I'd like to see some data on that though! We've always tried to steer people down the responsive route instead of separate m-commerce.