Featured Snippets Drop
On February 19, MozCast determined a significant drop (40% day-over-day) in SERPs with Featured Snippets, with no instant indications 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 constantly good to check our sanity. In this case, other data sets showed a drop on the same date, however the intensity of the drop varied considerably. So, I inspected our STAT information throughout desktop queries (en-US just)-- over 2 million everyday SERPs-- and saw the following:.
While mobile SERPs in STAT revealed greater overall prevalence, the pattern was extremely comparable, 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 substantial overlap, the desktop and mobile data sets may include various search expressions. While the desktop data set is presently about 2.2 M day-to-day SERPs, mobile is closer to 1.7 M.
Note that the MozCast 10K keywords are manipulated (intentionally) towards shorter, more competitive phrases, whereas STAT includes many more "long-tail" phrases. This explains the overall greater prevalence in STAT, as longer phrases tend to include concerns and other natural-language queries that are more likely to drive Featured Snippets.
Why the big difference?
diabetes.
lupus.
autism.fibromyalgia.
acne.While Finance had a much lower initial prevalence of Featured Bits, Finance SERPs also saw enormous losses on February 19. Some high-volume examples include:.
pension.
threat management.mutual funds.
roth ira.financial investment.
Like the Health classification, these terms have a Knowledge Panel in the right-hand column on desktop, with some basic information (mainly from Wikipedia/Wikidata). Again, these are competitive "head" terms, where Google was showing several 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 "... could possibly impact an individual's future joy, health, financial stability, or security." These are locations where Google is clearly concerned about the quality of the responses they offer.
What about passage indexing?
Could this be connected to the "passage indexing" upgrade that presented around February 10? While there's a lot we still don't learn about the effect of that update, and while that upgrade impacted rankings and very likely affected organic bits of all types, there's no reason to believe that update would impact whether a Featured Snippet is shown for any given question. While the timelines overlap a little, these events are most likely separate.
Is the bit sky falling?
While the 40% drop in Featured Snippets in MozCast appears to be genuine, the impact was mostly on shorter, more competitive terms and specific industry classifications. For those in YMYL classifications, it certainly makes good sense to examine the influence on your rankings and search traffic.
Generally speaking, this is a common pattern with SERP functions-- Google ramps them up with time, then reaches a limit where quality starts to suffer, and then reduces the volume. As Google ends up being more positive in the quality of read more their Featured Snippet algorithms, they may turn that volume back up. I certainly don't anticipate Included Snippets to disappear any time soon, and they're still extremely prevalent in longer, natural-language questions.
Think about, too, that a few of these Featured Bits might simply have actually been redundant. Prior to February 19, somebody searching for "shared fund" may have seen this Featured Snippet:.
Google is assuming a "What is/are ...?" question here, however "mutual fund" is an extremely unclear search that might have several intents. At the exact same time, Google was currently revealing an Understanding Graph entity in the right-hand column (on desktop), probably from trusted sources:.
Why display both, especially if Google has concerns about quality in a category where they're really sensitive to quality concerns? At the exact same time, while it may sting a bit to lose these Included Snippets, consider whether they were really delivering. While this term may be great for vanity, how often are people at the very start of a search journey-- who may not even understand what a mutual fund is-- going to convert into a client? Oftentimes, they may be leaping straight to the Knowledge Panel and not even taking the Featured Bit into account.
For Moz Pro clients, bear in mind that you can easily track Featured Bits from the "SERP Features" page (under "Rankings" in the left-hand nav) and filter for keywords with Included Snippets. You'll get a report something like this-- search for the scissors icon to see where Featured Snippets are appearing and whether you (blue) or a rival (red) are capturing 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 rival, there's really little you can do to reverse this sort of sweeping modification. For sites in heavily-impacted verticals, we can just keep track of the situation and attempt to examine our new truth.
Update: Stop by word-count.
I recognized that we could look at word-count in the STAT information to evaluate the theory that much shorter search questions (which are usually both more competitive and more uncertain) were hit harder by this upgrade. 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 questions dropped substantially greater than the STAT average, and 3+- word questions were struck much less. Why these questions were struck isn't as clear, however the impact on really short questions is clear.