How does a Responsive Site kill SEO?
-
How does a Responsive Site poentially kill SEO?
I've seen a few feeds on twitter how a website took a rankings dive after implementing a Responsive theme; yet, it's not clear to me what is actually going on within a Responsive site that would cause the SEO rank to tank? I can only speculate that it introduces a bunch of 404 errors, or that it changes all of the URLs into gibberish, so you loose all of the links coming into your website if not 301'ed?
Can someone clarify, what are the actual mechanical issues on a Responsive website that becomes a concern to SEO? Thanks.
-
Hello Jason,
This is one of the best (ok, IMO the best explanation of responsive design I have seen to date) especially laying out the difference between server side - dynamic design - and responsive. The thought you placed into this whole answer to provide one that is concise and cogent is excellent.
I like the point up about the lazy designer and page speed as something to be aware of.
Typically, as an agency, we are not often dealing with a client bringing mobile and desktop forward. It is more likely we will be dealing with someone whose site has lost appeal, power, relevance, etc. and we typically build responsive for all. So the thoughts around url changes are helpful as well.Thank You,
Robert
-
Hi Steve,
At this point I wouldn't say responsive design is fundamentally better or worse than other options from an SEO perspective. But there are a number of SEO pitfalls you'd want to avoid when moving from some other structure, to a responsive design.
First a Quick Set of Definitions:
"Responsive Design" means different things to different people. If you ask 5 people to define it, you'll get 8 different definitions.
Most people (including Google and the W3C) would say that "responsive design" is primarily using media queries and proportional layouts to adapt a webpage to different viewport widths on the client.
Detecting UserAgents is actually a server side technique that would commonly be used for an alternative approach to responsive design, that google calls "Dynamic Design".
Many people mistakenly call both Serve Side Adaption and Client Side Adaption "Responsive Design" when in fact there are important distinctions for SEO.
Changes in URLS can hurt SEO
In either case, if you're moving from having separate URL's for your desktop (www.mysite.com) and mobile (m.mysite.com) to a new design based on responsive or dynamic design, then you are going to be changing some URL's in the process. Any time you change your URL's you run the risk of hurting your SEO. The best practice is to 301 redirect all the m.mysite.com pages to their new www.mysite.com responsive design equivalents If you happen to be changing the main desktop URL's at the same time, it's even more important that you use 301's to preserve the equity in your old URLs.
Responsive vs. Dynamic
Google loves client side responsive design (it's the easiest/cheapest for Google to crawl), so it's actually their first choice, and you don't have to do anything special for responsive design SEO.
If however, you are doing "Dynamic Design" such as detecting user agents on the server to adapt pages for different devices, then you need to tell Google that the page will look different for different user agents. This is done using the Vary HTTP header.
Content Differences
Responsive Design means that you basically have the same content on your desktop and mobile version of your site. That can mean that you don't have keywords which are popular on mobile devices, such as "download mobile app" which can obviously hurt SEO for those keywords. Having a dynamic site (with different content for mobile and desktop) or even having separate URL's for mobile and desktop can sometimes give you a better chance to optimize your keywords for mobile searches.
Speed
Most Responsive Designs are slower than Dynamic designs or separate URLs. It doesn't have to be that way, as their are work-arounds for Responsive Design speed challenges. But fundamentally, responsive design means downloading more variations and code to the client, than a well behaved dynamic site, which means it's usually slower. Too often, lazy designers use the same images for all devices on a responsive design page, and then it's quite a bit slower.
Pagespeed is an SEO ranking factor so, it can hurt your SEO. If you choose Responsive Design, make sure you are only downloading properly optimized images for each device, and that you have highly optimized the pageload of your responsive design. Your users and your search engines will thank you for having fast pages.
Conclusion
Responsive Design doesn't have to be bad for SEO, and in many cases it is better for SEO than other options. The search engines have given us good options to have optimal SEO with any of the three major techniques for addressing device diversity, so I would't let SEO drive my architecture decision.
I'd choose separate URLs, Dynamic Server Adaption, Responsive Design Client Adaption, or mixes of the last two (Responsive Design with Server Side Components or RESS) based on my user base, the tasks my users are going to want to complete on each device, and my development resources, rather than any concerns over SEO.
All the best.
-Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg
-
Steve
First, I stumbled onto this discussion and my mouth fell open as I gurgled out ... What the....
So, I then read the good answers from Thomas and Daniel and felt a twinge of relief. Here is what I suggest when you hear something like that: First ask the question It was your site that fell in rankings or someone elses? If they say someone elses, ask if they personally saw the rankings drop post implementation of the new design. If theirs, ask the same pointed questions if you were trying to help someone determine what the problem is.
Now, once you ascertain (and I am willing to bet over 90% fall into this group) that they never personally saw the data, you have answer one: Somebody said that somebody said. OK, not great SEO work. But, if they say it is theirs or they got to dig through, ask this How did it affect the rankings and how did you determine that was the cause? Now you are getting into some serious SEO detective mojo! That's where we find the real answers.Great question Steve!!
Good job Thomas and Daniel, Thanks for keeping the world clean!
Robert
PS - we build a lot of sites and 80% plus are responsive. We have see NO drop in rankings that could be attributable to a responsive design. BTW our site and several of our large firm owned sites are fully responsive and rocking cool. They are fine.
-
Hi Steve,
I think you should rephrase the question...
How can a responsive design harm SEO?
Typically a responsive design is driven by either USER AGENT or screen size... Both of these, if implemented correctly will not affect the way the Google Bot crawls the site. I would doubt there will be issues with 404's as the URL will be the same regardless of the device.
I would suggest it is poor implementation of the design.
Hope this helps!
Dan
-
The re-ordering of content on a page could give the page different emphasis. You would have to take a look at the page as a Google bot, to determine if the responsive theme displays the content differently. This could even go as far as throwing up links that should be navigational as content. What does or doesn't fall between a
and
makes a difference.
For the most part, I wouldn't expect a properly designed responsive site to change your SEO.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Drupal Domain Access SEO Issues
I'm working with a new developer to redesign several Drupal sites and have 3-4 sites with similar designs and modules. The developer is keen on using Drupal Domain Access to make maintenance and sharing user information easier. Each site currently has a unique domain and content (although the sites are in related niches). Are there issues from an SEO perspective with the Drupal Domain Access Module? With only one instance of Drupal on the backend will Google somehow not view these as independent sites? Thanks for any info!
Web Design | | talltrees0 -
Could a redirecting a homepage mess with seo? if so is there any documentation you could point me too? Thanks!
I have a global page for our site but the global site has the exact same content as the main navigation personal page. If I redirect /index to /personal how much seo damage are we doing?
Web Design | | Miguelquirarte0 -
301 Redirect all pictures when moving to a new site?
We have 30,000 pictures on our site. Moz will return 404's on some occasionally, but Google seems to ignore those. Should I 301 redirect all those images when we move to a new site lay-out? Appreciate your views!
Web Design | | Discountvc0 -
Free websites that are good with SEO?
Dear members, I am looking for a free/ almost free website which is good for SEO. For example i am looking at WIX right now but i keeping reading that they aren't optimal for SEO. Does anybody has some tips which website is can use, example weebly, strato, etc?? Many thanks!
Web Design | | rijwielcashencarry0400 -
Should I Kill the Old Domain or Work Through the Redirect?
Our IT department wasn't able to create a new directory on the current domain name for whatever reason and so we had to create a new domain name called ww2.domain.com to build the new site. So now we have the new site up and appartly some PDFs and pages are being directed to the from the old site. www.domain.com but 10,000 pages /PDFs are still indexed in Google and are not redirected. So when you open the page you get the old www.domain.com instead of it redirecting to ww2.domain.com. It's sort of a mess! My question is can we just kill the old domain name and move the ww2.domain.com back to the old domain? We also want to do away with the ww2.domain.com and go back to www.domain.com. I know it's confusing as heck! What would you recommend?
Web Design | | Eagle-ABS0 -
Using content from other sites without duplicate content penalties?
Hi there, I am setting up a website, where i believe it would substantially benefit users experience if i setup a database of information on artists. I am torn because to feasibly do this correctly, i would have content that is built from multiple sources, but has no real unique content. It would have parts from Wikipedia, parts from other websites etc. All would be sourced of-course. My concern is that if i do this, am i risking in devaluing my website because of this. Is there a way i can handle this without taking a hit?
Web Design | | BorisD0 -
Thoughts on my site structure? (And a quick thank you!)
I've learned a lot through this site (and the community built around it) about everything SEO related. It's been extremely helpful in helping us help others to learn that all people (even those with a "disability") deserve respect and integrity. (Wow, that's a lot of helps!) So I wanted to give a quick thanks to everyone on this site who has helped, supported, and encouraged us. We really appreciate it. One thing I've been trying to do on my site is look at my categories and over all site structure. I've pruned a lot of things from the menu bar; pruned away and tightened up the categories, and even rearranged the navigation of the site. As you can see, I have several drop down categories up top. I wanted to see if I could get some feedback on how what I'm doing looks thus far, specifically as it relates to my categories / menus / navigation. Although any feedback you'd like to provide would be more than appreciated. One thing I'm curious about (and not sure how to tackle it) is regarding the top most item in the main menus. For instance you'll see I have a top level category called "Down Syndrome Resources" which takes them to all of the posts in that category. Under that, there is a drop down menus that gives them other categories, and even some pages that fall under the topic of Down syndrome resources. I'm not sure if people would know the top most item is a link, or just look at the ones below it. (If that makes sense.) (On a side note I have therapy as a category as well as parenting, the truth is those could all be sub-categories I guess since everything on my site pretty much could fall under "down syndrome resources." Maybe this is a huge FAIL I made when setting up my categories.) I'm also not sure if I should use some sub-categories as well. For instance I have a main category for Therapy. Under that I have posts about speech therapy, physical therapy, and occupational therapy. Right now they are all grouped into therapy. Do you think I should use sub-categories on those 3 terms, leave as is, or perhaps another option? Another question I have is regarding landing pages. It seems like I need to have a landing page for my top "key words." For example therapy. Now if you visit my /therapy you get the category index page, not a "landing page." Same would go for the sub-categories if I were to create them. So I'm not sure if I should make a new post or page naming it something else (maybe "Down syndrome therapy" another named "Down-syndrome-physical-therapy" etc) or something else. (Although therapy isn't really the keyword I want to rank for, I'm thinking more along the lines of children therapy, pediatric therapy, therapy for children with Down syndrome, etc. So maybe I need to rename my categories? I was going for shorter names, so I very well may have done this incorrectly.) All of these questions are things I'm not to sure about, so I'd appreciate any feedback or advice you can give me. And since I'm learning, I could be doing things wrong that I don't even know to ask. So feel free to tell me what you see that's wrong, you won't hurt my feelings. I promise. 🙂 Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Mobile Web Sites
Hi I have started offering customers a mobile app view of their existing websites using sencha touch which works well. On visiting the website if a user visits via a mobile device they access the mobile app view of the site. I am looking for some best practice please - as many of the customers already have hosting with their existing website so would it be possible to use a subdomain of m.theirdomain.com which will point to the mobile website which will be hosted on our servers in the cloud. Or is the only alternative to use a subdomain for their mobile sites because they are hosted with us in the cloud of businessname.ourdomain.com ? Many Thanks
Web Design | | ocelot0