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
-
SEO Problem With My Pages ?
Hi everyone, I created a self-hosted custom PHP website the page is ( custom cosmetic boxes ), but it doesn't show up on Google. I tried to follow tutorials on the HubSpot, but even my site sucks. Please help me where I am wrong. Maybe the little thing is left unattended, which makes it void.
Web Design | | fbowable
Please help me.0 -
Does the blog widget with latest blog-posts at homepage helps in SEO?
Hi all, We are planning to add a widget at our website homepage which displays recent blog-posts with dates. Google favours new and latest content. So will these consistent new posts help in improving website ranking? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Website Redesign and Migration to Squarespace killed my Ranking
My old website was dated, ugly, impossible to update and a mess between hard-coded pages and WP, but we were ranking #1 in the organic searches for our key words. I just redesigned my website using Squarespace. I kept most of the same text on the pages (for key words) and kept the same Meta-Tags and Title Tags for each page as much as possible. Once I was satisfied that I had done as much on-page optimization as I could, I changed the IP in our Domain Name Registry so that it would point to our new website on the Squarespace host. And our new website was live! ...Then I watched in dismay as our ranking fell into oblivion. I think this might have something to do with not doing any 301 redirects from the old website and losing all of my link juice. Is this the case? And, if so, how do I fix it? Our website url is www.kanataskinclinic.ca Thanks
Web Design | | StillLearning1 -
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 -
SEO Value to Improving HTML Code of Website That Validates According to W3C?
Greetings MOZ Community: My real estate website www.nyc-officespace-leader.com, originally designed in Drupal, was relaunched using Wordpress in 2013. The code for all URLs validates. The relaunch was performed by developers in Argentina. As part of an SEO campaign, I very reputable design/coding company in the has provided new wire frames to correct useability issues holding back conversions. In the course of the design adjustments they inspected the code and have told me that it is inefficient, that a number of shortcuts were taken and that the code does not conform to Wordpress best practices. What concerns me most is their claim that the quality of coding makes it more difficult for Google to index the site and this may be detrimental to ranking. Is it possible for the original developers to clean up this code if the deficiencies are pointed out to them? Or once coding shortcuts are taken are they impossible to fix? Would it make sense for me to request that the new design team put together a list of HTML deficiencies and provide to the original developers and ask them to correct? I am spending tens of thousands of dollars on content optimization, content marketing. It would be absurd if these coding issues would ultimately prevent improvement in ranking and traffic. At the same time, I hate to be a cynic but the domestic design/coding firm, while being very professional, does have an incentive in getting me to ditch the original design so I commit to an costly rebranding. If these issues are really minor maybe it is not worth making the effort to clean up the code (assuming that is even possible) and focus the budget on content marketing. Any thoughts?
Web Design | | Kingalan10 -
Site Doing Horrible After Redesign
Hello Fellow Forum Members: Thank you all for taking the time to read this. This is in follow up to one of my previous questions, but I now have more information. I will try to be as concise as possible and want to sincerely thank anybody who invests time in answering this. Around February 9, 2013, we launched our new site on the Bigcommerce platform. We moved from Volusion after 6 years. We had paid the Bigcommerce partner for an upgraded 301 redirect package as I was thoroughly concerned about losing rankings. By the end of February our rankings were diminishing. We expected a slight dip due to the new site. As of May, our organic traffic had dropped by 82%. Google WMT is showing 1500+ 404 errors. Many have to do with review page type URLs and some were just plain never redirected apparently. In May, we hired a wonderful SEO company that is a heavy contributor to the Moz community. They have been generous and wonderful to work with. By the end of this last week it was determined that most of the coding suggestions our SEO was making could NOT be implemented in Bigcommerce because Bigcommerce will not allow access to the PHP files by our developer, thus hindering the execution of these suggestions. Some of these were move the blog to the root, use canonical on the home page, use canonical for pagination, stop the indexing of https URLs and a few more. Today, June 25 we are at a complete loss and trying to just keep our business alive. The opinion of both the SEO and the developer is that my choice of Bigcommerce as a platform was not the best. So my main question is what are the odds our rankings have decreased due to the lack of 301 redirects during our migration to Bigcommerce versus the rankings decreasing do to Bigcommerce being a bad choice as a platform? We are being advised to redevelop our entire site on an Open Source platorm such as Wordpress or Magento, but if that's not needed I certainly don't want to have to do that. I hope I have provided a decent amount of history and information. Thank you for any help/advice you are willing to offer.
Web Design | | josh3300 -
How do I gain full SEO value from individual property pages?
A client of ours has a vacation rental business with rental locations all over the country. Their old sites were a messy assembly of black hat, broken links and htaccess files that were used over and over on each site. We are redoing everything for them, in one site, with multiple subdirectories for individual locations, like Aspen, Fort Meyers, etc. Anyhow, I'm putting together the SEO plan for the site and I have a problem. The individual rental properties have great SEO value (lots of text, indexable pictures, can create google/bing location pages), and are great for linking in social media (Look at this wonderful property, rental price just reduced!). However, I don't want individual properties, which will have very similar keywords, links, descriptions, etc, competing with each other when indexed. Truth be told, I don't really want search engines linking directly to the individual property pages at all. The intended browsing experience should allow a user to "narrow down" exactly what they're seeking using the site until the perfect rental appears. What I want is for searchers to be directed to the property listing index that most closely matches what they're seeking (Ft. Meyers Rental Condos or Breckenridge Rental Homes), and then allow them to narrow it down from there. This is ideal for the users, because it allows them to see all available properties that match what they want, and ideal for the customer, because it applies dozens of pages of SEO mojo to a single index, rather than dozens of pages. So I can't "noindex" or "nofollow", because I want all that good SEO mojo. I can't REL=CANONICAL, because the property pages aren't similar enough to the index. I can't 301 Redirect because I want the users to be able to see the property pages at some point. I'm stymied.
Web Design | | SpokeHQ0 -
Redesign of an ecommerce site
We are thinking to redesign our ecommerce site and was wondering would we loose our google rankings in any way? That's something we don't want. We want to achieve a better and cleaner looking website. It's a more like template redesign. But adding extra functionalities. We will add upselling and crossselling features to product pages. Some products have reviews and some don't. If a product doesn't have a review random testimonials will replace the reviews. We will redirect all urls's if category structure changes. All content title, headings remain same. Any suggestions are welcome 🙂
Web Design | | Jvalops0