Featured Snippets Drop
On February 19, MozCast determined a remarkable drop (40% day-over-day) in SERPs with Featured Snippets, with no immediate indications of healing. Here's a two-week view (February 10-23):.
Are we losing our minds?
After the year we've all had, it's always good to inspect our peace of mind. In this case, other data sets revealed a drop on the exact same date, but the intensity of the drop differed drastically. I inspected our STAT data across desktop queries (en-US only)-- over 2 million daily SERPs-- and saw the following:.
While mobile SERPs in STAT revealed higher overall prevalence, the pattern was really similar, with a 9% day-over-day-drop on February 19 and a total drop of about 12% because February 10. Keep in mind that, while there is substantial overlap, the desktop and mobile information sets may consist of different search expressions. While the desktop information set is currently about 2.2 M everyday SERPs, mobile is closer to 1.7 M.
Note that the MozCast 10K keywords are manipulated (deliberately) toward shorter, more competitive expressions, whereas STAT consists of many more "long-tail" expressions. This discusses the overall greater prevalence in STAT, as longer expressions tend to include questions and other natural-language queries that are more likely to drive Featured Snippets.
Why the huge distinction?
What's driving the 40% drop in MozCast and, presumably, more competitive terms? First things first: we have actually hand-verified a number of these losses, and there is no proof of measurement mistake. One practical element of the 10K MozCast keywords is that they're equally divided across 20 historic Google Advertisements classifications. While some changes impact market categories likewise, the Featured Bit loss showed a significant range of impact:.
Competitive health care terms lost more than two-thirds of their Included Snippets. It ends up that many of these terms had other popular features, such as Medical Knowledge Panels. Here are some high-volume terms that lost Included Bits in the Health category:.
diabetes.
lupus.
autism.fibromyalgia.
acne.While Financing had a much lower preliminary prevalence of Featured Snippets, Finance SERPs also saw enormous losses on February 19. Some high-volume examples include:.
pension.
danger management.shared funds.
roth ira.investment.
Like the Health classification, these terms have a Knowledge Panel in the right-hand column on desktop, with some standard details (mainly from Wikipedia/Wikidata). Again, these are competitive "head" terms, where Google was displaying numerous SERP features prior to February 19.Both Health and Financing search expressions line up carefully with so-called YMYL (Your Cash or Your Life) content locations, which, in Google's own words "... could possibly affect a person's future happiness, health, monetary stability, or security." These are areas where Google is plainly worried about the quality of the responses they provide.
What about passage indexing?
Could this be connected to the "passage indexing" upgrade that rolled out around February 10? While there's a lot we still do not know about the effect of that update, and while that update affected rankings and most likely affected organic bits of all types, there's no reason to think that upgrade would affect whether or not an Included Bit is displayed for any offered question. While the timelines overlap slightly, these occasions are most likely separate.
Is the snippet sky falling?
While the 40% drop in Featured Snippets in MozCast seems genuine, the impact was primarily on shorter, more competitive terms and particular industry classifications. For those in YMYL categories, it definitely makes good sense to assess the impact on your rankings and search traffic.
Generally speaking, this is a typical pattern with SERP functions-- Google ramps them up with time, then reaches a limit where quality begins to suffer, and then decreases the volume. As Google becomes more confident in the quality of their Featured Bit algorithms, they may turn that volume back up. I certainly don't expect Included Snippets to vanish at any time quickly, and they're still really widespread in longer, natural-language questions.
Consider, too, that a few of these Included Bits might just have actually been redundant. Prior to February 19, somebody looking for "shared fund" might have seen this Featured Bit:.
Google is assuming a "What is/are ...?" concern here, but "shared fund" is an extremely uncertain search that could have several intents. At the exact same time, Google was already showing an Understanding Graph entity in the right-hand column (on desktop), presumably from trusted sources:.
Why display both, particularly if Google has concerns about quality in a category where they're very sensitive to quality problems? At the exact same time, while it may sting a bit to lose these Featured Snippets, think about whether they were actually providing. While this term may be great for vanity, how frequently are individuals at the very start of a search journey-- who may not even know what a mutual fund is-- wordpress development brisbane going to convert into a customer? In a lot of cases, they might be leaping straight to the Understanding Panel and not even taking the Featured Snippet into account.
For Moz Pro customers, remember that you can quickly track Featured Snippets from the "SERP Features" page (under "Rankings" in the left-hand nav) and filter for keywords with Included Bits. You'll get a report something like this-- try to find the scissors icon to see where Included Snippets are appearing and whether you (blue) or a rival (red) are catching them:.
Whatever the impact, one thing remains true-- Google giveth and Google taketh away. Unlike losing a ranking or losing a Featured Bit to a competitor, there's extremely little you can do to reverse this type of sweeping modification. For sites in heavily-impacted verticals, we can only keep track of the situation and try to examine our brand-new truth.
Update: Visit word-count.
I recognized that we might look at word-count in the STAT data to evaluate the theory that shorter search queries (which are generally both more competitive and more unclear) were hit harder by this upgrade. Here's the breakdown of STAT's 2M desktop (en-US) keywords ...
