Could Mobile Responsive Website Design Hurt Your Seo?

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Allow your jaw to become unhinged at this statistic: There are over 1 million more mobile devices activated every day across the world than there are babies born. Yeah, mind = blown. Indeed, designing with a mobile-first mindset becomes more important—quite literally—by the day. As does answering burning questions related to mobile design best practices. For example: Is mobile responsive web design good for SEO or not? This has become a hotly debated topic, even right here in the Copyblogger comment sections, with reasonable minds making reasonable arguments on both sides. Depending on where you look and what you read, you might come away thinking that Responsive Web Design is in perfectly fine shape regarding SEO … or that it creates a mess that's going to destroy your search results. Is it possible that the real answer is more complex than either of these? What would Google do? You might have heard that Google recommends utilizing mobile responsive design on your website. Any article you read touting the SEO benefits of responsive design typically starts here.

This is what Google says on the subject, specifically: Google Business Email List recommends webmasters follow the industry best practice of using responsive web design, namely serving the same HTML for all devices and using only CSS media queries to decide the rendering on each device. One of the oft-cited SEO benefits of responsive design is the ability to present a single URL for a page, rather than a separate mobile. Theoretically, this should help the overall SEO of your site and pages by channeling all present and potential link juice into a single URL, instead of splitting it. Google's recommendation above fits this premise. But that statement from Google is just bullet point 1 of two bullets beneath the heading “Overview of Google's recommendations. Bullet point number two says: “If responsive design is not the best option to serve your users, Google supports having your content being served using different HTML. So Google - they of the 67% search market share - recommends responsive web design first, while quickly noting that it's okay if responsive web design is not used … if there's a better option for serving your audience.

The bots can handle it, Google assures us, if you choose to offer different sites for desktop and mobile users, separate URLs and all. As explained by noted responsive web design-for-SEO critic Bryson Meunier of Search Engine Land, Google provides “webmasters with the option of consolidating link equity in separate URLs with bidirectional annotations or switchboard tags.” The level of sophistication needed just to understand that sentence suggests that Option 2 is the more complicated of the two. But hold that thought, we'll come back to it. What's most important here is the big picture point, which is a vital one: This is yet another example — straight from the horse's mouth in this case — of how the best SEO strategy is to simply create great content and present it in the most user -friendly way possible.