Matt Cutts Reveals – Responsive Design Will Not Hinder The SEO Flow

The surge in popularity of mobile devices has resulted in the emergence of responsive web design. Therefore, it is not surprising that mobile traffic has gained huge market shares in the past couple of years. However, there has also been a great concern about the SEO value of a responsive website. Debates are quite common; with one side speaking in favor while the other going against it. Amidst all these turmoil, it was about time that Google’s Matt Cutts decides (finally!) to bring his opinion to the forefront and end the confusion for good.

A few days back, Matt Cutts revealed in a video what he thinks about this whole situation – whether responsive web design hurts SEO or not. Let’s have a look what he had to say:

So what do we get from the video?

What is the biggest benefit of responsive web design? A website applied with the responsive technique can be accessed both with a desktop browser and a mobile browser, and the URL remains the same too. It is just a rescaling of the website layout, and doesn’t run the risk of losing SEO benefits. Unlike creating a separate mobile website, responsive design is a smarter way as a website will retain the same URL. Cutts went on to explain that creating a mobile website is pretty cool too. However, if the “rel=canonical” and all those sorts of things are not done properly, the PageRank between those two pages will get divided. With responsive design, there is no risk as such.

Final Verdict

There is no need to discard mobile websites though. If you like it, you can surely give it a go. But you do have to make sure that the webmaster uses all the mobile tools available to him from Google in order to prevent duplicate content or split PageRank issues. Matt Cutts states that responsive design is free from all these hassles. So it’s pretty evident that both responsive design and SEO are in sync and go hand-in-hand pretty smoothly.