Go to the Google Webmaster Blog and check out the recommendations for building smartphone optimized websites. Google clearly prefers responsive web design, which of course, is pretty much common sense since it makes their job easier :) Google mentions the obvious advantages of responsive web design:
- It keeps your desktop and mobile content on a single URL, which is easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to and for Google's algorithms to assign the indexing properties to your content.
- Google can discover your content more efficiently as we wouldn't need to crawl a page with the different Googlebot user agents to retrieve and index all the content.
Conclusion
Personally, responsive web design should be your default strategy for supporting multiple devices until it is clear that a separate user experience is necessary. Responsive web design is clearly easier to implement, provides a consistent user experience across all your devices, and according to Google will make it easier for SEO.You may be interested in reading: Mobile Development with Firefox 15 and Responsive Mode and Mobile Web Development for iOS and Android with Adobe Shadow.
Full article here: http://www.davidhayden.me/blog/google-recommends-responsive-web-design-for-seo
