Ever since the “Mobilegeddon” update from Google earlier this year, we understand the importance of having a website that is “mobile friendly” and the role it plays in digital marketing. The three different configurations of mobile sites are responsive, adaptive, and the traditional mobile sites, but does Google favor responsive sites over the other two types of mobile sites and does it lend any favor to your Google ranking?
Reasons Why:
The reason why we question whether responsive mobile sites are favored by Google is due to the Google Developers Mobile Guide on responsive web design. The guide states that Google recommends the use of a responsive web design, but does not go in depth as to reasons why, only a list of positive outcomes of a having a responsive design is given, but nothing explaining if a responsive configuration is better than adoptive or traditional mobile sites.
When choosing a mobile configuration, Google only recognizes the three different mobile configurations and prefers responsive because of how the URL of your website would stay the same and how the HTML would stay the same.
However, there is no solid evidence proving that going with a responsive mobile site will affect the websites Google search ranking directly. It is understood that having a responsive website will solve many issues that web designers would come across if they had an adoptive or traditional mobile websites such as bad redirects, improper canonicalization, or pages loading slowly. What we can conclude is that having a poor mobile user experience can lead to a high bounce rate thus affecting your Google rankings negatively, but besides that, there is no clear proof of responsive sites directly affecting your search ranking.