"Google 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." https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/ I'm currently in the process of re-designing my website... trying to learn HTML5 and CSS3; I'm not a professional web developer, but what I do have is growing web traffic. I was playing around with a responsive design, but I find it intimidating and complicated. I like the idea of using a separate mobile site, but I'm struggling with the thought when Google themselves are recommending responsive. Why is Google recommending responsive rather than just leaving it be up to the Webmaster / Business? What are sites like Amazon.com suppose to do with all their content? Even if they did create a responsive design, could that add a lot of code to the templates, affecting load times on small smartphones with limited bandwidth? What's this talk of having to spider two websites? Could not the webmaster simply exclude the mobile site in their robots.txt file? To me there are pros and cons to a responsive vs. separate mobile site
Whoah... I think Google is up to something again here... Fancy another update... Is you're into this whole SEO thing, better do what Google says.
I think a simple explanation to that is the effects of duplicate content penalty (i may be wrong)... some of the sites out there are passing their URL to m.domain.com to act as their mobile sites... so in terms of site indexing... m.domain.com/post-1 and www.domain.com/post-1 may seems to have similar and double content under the same domain (and readers can still read the m.domain.com/post-1 on their desktop on top of the usual url). That's why Google is suggesting that it's better for your site to be responsive so that you do not have to pass your site url to another.
Google is recommending this because of the growing number of people using mobile/tablet to view sites. If your site loses visitors fast (high bounce rate) due to a clunky 'mobile' website, then it'll rank you lower. Having a seperate 'mobile' site can also be hazardous, especially if it doesn't automatically switch when loaded on a computer screen. I've clicked on links from my desktop that were shared from a mobile device that lead to a mobile version of a site, and didn't recognize that I was on a desktop. Made me leave the site right away. Responsive really doesn't take too much code to make happen. Just start with a base responsive theme on your CMS and modify from there. Then it's set up from the beginning.
Responsive design is good for everybody from search engines to webmasters ... I am trying to make my current blogger template responsive, any help will be appreciated. Thank you
Best to re-design your site, It's not that difficult to set all the widths to % instead of fixed widths. Once you get the hang of responsive you will find it much easier than trying to create 3-∞ versions of every page. The amazon site probably detects the site and does in the back end what is done by the browser in the case of a responsive design The bottom line is Google's recommendations and the algorithms used in the SERP probably talk to one another, you can disagree with them and they will see it....