Can responsive design hurt your website in term of SEO? When more than 30% of searches come from mobile devices many might be interested to know the answer.
Yesterday Matt Cutts published a video on YouTube answering this questions and we thought it might be a good idea to speak more about this on our blog.
Some of you might not be familiar with the terminology so let us explain it first:
What is responsive design?
Responsive design is simply an attempt to provide equal experience for user when browsing webpages regardless of the platform. So when you open a website from your mobile phone or tablet the pages fit the screen and they provide good experience for the user.
Since making your web page responsive provides only benefits for the visitors and it comes from 1 URL it doesn’t make any sense for Google to penalize websites that use responsive design.
What is a mobile website?
Mobile website is a website especially created for mobile phones and tablets. In this situation when the user makes a visit, he’s redirected to another version of the site especially created for mobile devices. The user might be redirected to another URL that looks something like “m.domainname.com”.
Here if the redirects are not done properly they might hurt your SERP. This is why it’s really important to follow up Google’s guidelines for Mobile-Optimized Websites.
What do Google recommend?
- Keep in mind the capabilities of mobile phone’s web browsers
When configuring the types of mobile phones you want your website to support Google recommend to take a look at the capabilities of their web browsers.
Keep in mind that the browsers of most smartphones can render normal desktop webpages but the ones of feature phones are unable to do so. This might cause some issues for the user like not being able to load website, slow loading speed and might trigger high bounce rate. As a result your SERP will be decreased and it will be harder for you to work on SEO.
- Follow industry’s best practice of using responsive web design
For responsive design serve all devices with the same HTML files and use only CSS media queries to decide the rendering on each device.
- For mobile websites use Googlebot to handle both setups appropriately
When you prefer to have a mobile website instead of a responsive one Google allows you to serve your content using different HTML files which may use the same or different URLs.
What are our recommendations?
If you want to make your website look good on mobile devices hire an agency that has at least some basic understanding of SEO and are able to set up your website correctly. This will save you a lot of trouble into the future. The last think you’d want is to find out that you’re losing your ranking because your web agency didn’t know about Google’s guidelines about mobile sites.
