Does hiding responsive design elements on smaller media types impact Google's mobile crawler?

[jcgoodrich]

I have a responsive site and we hide elements on smaller media types. For example, we have an extensive sitemap in the footer on desktop, but when you shrink the viewport to mobile we don't show the footer. Does this practice make Google's mobile bot crawler much less efficient and therefore impact our mobile search rankings?

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There

Bradley's answer is great. I just want to add, you really should only worry about the suggestions here - http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ - in regards to Google and speed / UX factors that would affect ranking.

You should also check for mobile errors in Webmaster Tools.

[brad.s.knutson]

I don't believe that this will affect your mobile search rankings.  It's a common practice in responsive design to hide some elements on smaller screens.  Google knows this, and they take this into account.

Lots of sites have large sitemaps in their footer, and this doesn't really translate nicely to mobile screens.  You could consider creating a jQuery dropdown menu that includes the sitemap - this way the content is still there, accessible, and usable, but it doesn't take up any screen space until you click on the "menu" button.  Just a thought.

The only thing to be careful of is to make sure that you are not hiding keyword intensive objects.  It's hard to say, but it's possible that Google could interpret this as abuse.  I wouldn't leave it up to Google to try to interpret what you are doing.