Featured Snippets Drop
On February 19, MozCast measured a dramatic drop (40% day-over-day) in SERPs with Featured Bits, without any instant signs of healing. Here's a two-week view (February 10-23):.
Are we losing our minds?
After the year we have actually all had, it's always excellent to check our sanity. In this case, other information sets revealed a drop on the exact same date, but the severity of the drop differed significantly. So, I checked our STAT information throughout desktop queries (en-US only)-- over 2 million day-to-day SERPs-- and saw the following:.
While mobile SERPs in STAT revealed greater total prevalence, the pattern was very similar, with a 9% day-over-day-drop on February 19 and a total drop of about 12% since February 10. Keep in mind that, while there is considerable overlap, the desktop and mobile data sets may include various search expressions. While the desktop data set is currently about 2.2 M everyday SERPs, mobile is closer to 1.7 M.
Note that the MozCast 10K keywords are skewed (deliberately) towards shorter, more competitive expressions, whereas STAT includes much more "long-tail" phrases. This discusses the overall higher prevalence in STAT, as longer expressions tend to consist of questions and other natural-language questions that are more likely to drive Featured Snippets.
Why the huge difference?
What's driving the 40% drop in MozCast and, probably, more competitive terms? First things first: we've hand-verified a variety of these losses, and there is no proof of measurement error. One valuable element of the 10K MozCast keywords is that they're uniformly divided across 20 historic Google Ads classifications. While some changes impact market classifications likewise, the Featured Snippet loss showed a significant series of impact:.
Competitive healthcare terms lost more than two-thirds of their Featured Bits. It ends up that a number of these terms had other prominent features, such as Medical Understanding Panels. Here are some high-volume terms that lost Included Bits in the Health category:.
diabetes.
lupus.
autism.fibromyalgia.
acne.While Finance had a much lower preliminary prevalence of Featured Snippets, Financing SERPs likewise saw massive 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 showing numerous SERP functions prior to February 19.
Both Health and Financing search phrases line up closely with so-called YMYL (Your Cash or Your Life) material areas, which, in Google's own words "... might potentially impact a person's future happiness, health, monetary stability, or security." These are locations where Google is plainly concerned about the quality of the responses they provide.
What about passage indexing?
Could this be tied to the "passage indexing" update that rolled out around February 10? While there's a lot we still don't know about the impact of that upgrade, and while that update affected rankings and very likely affected natural snippets of all types, there's no reason to believe that upgrade would affect whether an Included Snippet is displayed for any provided query. While the timelines overlap somewhat, these events are more than likely separate.
Is the bit sky falling?
While the 40% drop in Featured Snippets in MozCast appears to be genuine, the impact was primarily on much shorter, more competitive terms and specific market classifications. For those in YMYL classifications, it certainly makes sense to seo services gold coast assess the influence on your rankings and search traffic.
Normally speaking, this is a typical pattern with SERP features-- Google ramps them up with time, then reaches a limit where quality starts to suffer, and then decreases the volume. As Google ends up being more positive in the quality of their Featured Snippet algorithms, they might turn that volume back up. I definitely do not expect Included Snippets to disappear any time soon, and they're still extremely prevalent in longer, natural-language queries.
Think about, too, that some of these Featured Bits may simply have actually been redundant. Prior to February 19, someone searching for "mutual fund" may have seen this Featured Bit:.
Google is assuming a "What is/are ...?" question here, however "mutual fund" is a highly uncertain search that might have several intents. At the exact same time, Google was already revealing a Knowledge Chart entity in the right-hand column (on desktop), most likely from relied on sources:.
At the exact same time, while it may sting a bit to lose these Featured Snippets, consider whether they were actually providing. In lots of cases, they may be leaping straight to the Knowledge Panel and not even taking the Included Snippet into account.
For Moz Pro consumers, keep in mind that you can easily track Included Snippets from the "SERP Functions" page (under "Rankings" in the left-hand nav) and filter for keywords with Featured Snippets. You'll get a report something like this-- search for the scissors icon to see where Featured Bits are appearing and whether you (blue) or a rival (red) are capturing them:.
Whatever the effect, one thing remains true-- Google giveth and Google taketh away. Unlike losing a ranking or losing an Included Snippet to a rival, there's extremely little you can do to reverse this type of sweeping modification. For websites in heavily-impacted verticals, we can just monitor the situation and attempt to assess our new truth.
Update: Stop by word-count.
I recognized that we could take a look at word-count in the STAT data to check the theory that shorter search inquiries (which are usually both more competitive and more ambiguous) were struck harder by this update. Here's the breakdown of STAT's 2M desktop (en-US) keywords ...There's very little nuance here-- 1-word queries were clobbered in this update, 2-word queries dropped significantly higher than the STAT average, and 3+- word queries were struck much less. Why these queries were hit isn't as clear, but the influence on really short inquiries is clear.
