Is it cloaking/hiding text if textual content is no longer accessible for mobile visitors on responsive webpages?

[mmewdell]

My company is implementing a responsive design for our website to better serve our mobile customers. However, when I reviewed the wireframes of the work our development company is doing, it became clear to me that, for many of our pages, large parts of the textual content on the page, and most of our sidebar links, would no longer be accessible to a visitor using a mobile device.

The content will still be indexable, but hidden from users using media queries. There would be no access point for a user to view much of the content on the page that's making it rank.

This is not my understanding of best practices around responsive design.

My interpretation of Google's guidelines on responsive design is that all of the content is served to both users and search engines, but displayed in a more accessible way to a user depending on their mobile device. For example, Wikipedia pages have introductory content, but hide most of the detailed info in tabs. All of the information is still there and accessible to a user...but you don't have to scroll through as much to get to what you want.

To me, what our development company is proposing fits the definition of cloaking and/or hiding text and links - we'd be making available different content to search engines than users, and it seems to me that there's considerable risk to their interpretation of responsive design.

I'm wondering what other people in the Moz community think about this - and whether anyone out there has any experience to share about inaccessable content on responsive webpages, and the SEO impact of this.

Thank you!

[FedeEinhorn]

I think you are completely correct. Making a responsive design does not mean "hiding the content that doesn't fit" rather "displaying it differently" so any user under any device is able to see the entire content without having to zoom in/out.

The example you posted about Wikipedia is the exact live example.

You could, however, remove areas of the page that have no actual value to a user browsing from a mobile device, that is acceptable, as even if you showed it they wouldn't be even able to see it (ex: flash content). This can be seen on sites that have floating social media buttons, than when on a mobile site, they usually accommodate those buttons elsewhere or completely hide them

[BlueprintMarketing]

I agree with Frederico everything he said is completely right on the money. If you are removing photographs and things that would not work well on a small screen then that is of course all right. You're removing content is in words even video then that is not okay.

PS Frederico I owe you an apology your right on the 301/https redirect question

sincerely,

Thomas