Google: Responsive Design Doesn't Give You A Ranking Boost

Google's John Mueller posted in a Stack Exchange thread that responsive design doesn't give you a ranking boost.

Yes, Google does officially recommend responsive as the approach to going mobile. But going responsive, doesn't give you more of a ranking boost that using any of the three accepted approaches to smartphone optimized sites.

Google does demote non-mobile friendly smartphone sites from ranking so well on mobile. And if you mess up with the techniques, they can hurt.

But responsive over different HTML with same URL, doesn't necessarily give you a ranking boost.

Google's John Mueller said:

No. Google currently doesn't differentiate sites like that.

You may see indirect effects (smartphone users liking your responsive site and recommending it to others), but we don't use that as a ranking factor. We are starting to use common configuration errors to adjust the rankings in smartphone search results though.

Forum discussion at Stack Exchange.