Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Seeking “innovative,” “stable,” and “interested”: How The Markup and CalMatters matched up
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
June 6, 2012, 5:42 p.m.
Mobile & Apps
LINK: developers.google.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   June 6, 2012

The search giant — the SE you’re Oing for — gets behind responsive design and serving the same code to both desktop/laptop and smartphone users. Why?

Using a single URL for a piece of content makes it easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to your content, and a single URL for the content helps Google’s algorithms assign the indexing properties for the content.

No redirection is needed for users to get to the device-optimized view, which reduces loading time. Also, user-agent-based redirection is error-prone and can degrade your site’s user experience…

Responsive web design saves resources for both your site and Google’s crawlers. For responsive web design pages, any Googlebot user-agents needs to crawl your pages once, as opposed to crawling multiple times with different user-agents, to retrieve your content. This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of the site’s contents and keep it appropriately fresh.

Google also gives some hints on how to make sure your non-responsive site gets properly crawled by the Googlebot. (In other Google news, Show tags

 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Seeking “innovative,” “stable,” and “interested”: How The Markup and CalMatters matched up
Nonprofit news has seen an uptick in mergers, acquisitions, and other consolidations. CalMatters CEO Neil Chase still says “I don’t think we’ve seen enough yet.”
“Objectivity” in journalism is a tricky concept. What could replace it?
“For a long time, ‘objectivity’ packaged together many important ideas about truth and trust. American journalism has disowned that brand without offering a replacement.”
From shrimp Jesus to fake self-portraits, AI-generated images have become the latest form of social media spam
Within days of visiting the pages — and without commenting on, liking, or following any of the material — Facebook’s algorithm recommended reams of other AI-generated content.