Google Wants Your Site to Be Responsive… You Should, Too (and We Can Help)

By Conor Runge, Media & Communications Strategies Web Developer

While Google is notorious for keeping the exact recipe for their search algorithm a closely guarded secret, they recently made very public, and very important, changes to how results are ranked and displayed. Previously, sites that worked well on mobile devices would be tagged in the results as “mobile friendly”, but the recent changes get rid of that tag. Under the new system, sites that are designed to deliver a full experience on mobile will be given greater weight in the search algorithm. This factor alone would be a significant change, but Google also made it clear that sites which are not designed to work on mobile or tablet devices would be penalized.
There are a number of technical factors that Google uses to determine whether a site meets the new criteria. These include the usage of Flash (Google previously called out sites for Flash usage in mobile search by warning users, but the new system actively penalizes the outdated and largely unsupported plug-in), bad mobile redirect links, inconsistent error pages, and others. Without getting into the technical details, Google is attempting to drive web developers towards responsive design.
Responsive sites deliver the same content to the browser regardless of device or screen size. For example, our website is built using responsive design- the page and content are exactly the same whether you view the site on a 27” desktop monitor or a  4” mobile device. The concept has been around for a few years, but has recently gained momentum as the speed and reliability of responsive sites has improved. It used to be that web developers would build a full-featured desktop site and a parallel mobile (or “m.”) site. While Google doesn’t explicitly penalize the separate site method, the two sites have to be built with the exact same information, including “404” or error pages. This method works well for very large ecommerce sites like Amazon and Target, but the responsive route is the best, if not only, route for smaller businesses.
Meeting these new criteria is vital for a site’s SEO and visibility on Google. The percentage of searches originating from a mobile device is growing every year, and Google this week revealed that mobile searches outnumber desktop in ten countries including the United States. Our site is currently at around 40% mobile visitors, with that number increasing every month. This was a large factor in our site redesign last year as our old site relied on outdated layouts and media plug-ins.
If you are interested in improving the search results for your site, the Media & Communications Strategies team can not only create and promote the content that will get you in the news, we also have the tools and experience to modernize your website to compete in the new search landscape.