Featured Snippets Drop
On February 19, MozCast measured a dramatic drop (40% day-over-day) in SERPs with Included Snippets, without any immediate signs 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 great to check our peace of mind. In this case, other information sets showed a drop on the same date, however the intensity of the drop differed dramatically. I inspected our STAT data across desktop queries (en-US just)-- over 2 million daily SERPs-- and saw the following:.
While mobile SERPs in STAT revealed higher overall frequency, the pattern was extremely comparable, with a 9% day-over-day-drop on February 19 and an overall drop of about 12% because February 10. This describes the general greater frequency in STAT, as longer expressions tend to include concerns and other natural-language questions that are more most likely to drive Featured Snippets.
Why the big difference?
What's driving the 40% drop in MozCast and, most likely, more competitive terms? While some modifications effect market categories likewise, the Featured Bit loss revealed a remarkable variety of impact:.
Competitive health care terms lost more than two-thirds of their Included Snippets. It ends up that much of these terms had other prominent functions, such as Medical Knowledge Panels. Here are some high-volume terms that lost Featured Snippets in the Health classification:.
diabetes.
lupus.
autism.fibromyalgia.
acne.While Finance had a much lower preliminary frequency of Featured Bits, Financing SERPs likewise 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 an Understanding 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 multiple SERP functions prior to February 19.
What about passage indexing?
Could this be tied to the "passage indexing" upgrade that rolled out around February 10? While there's a lot we still don't learn about the impact of that upgrade, and while that upgrade affected rankings and highly likely affected organic snippets of all types, there's no reason to think that upgrade would affect whether or not a Featured Bit is shown for any offered question. While the timelines overlap slightly, these events are most likely separate.
Is the snippet sky falling?
While the 40% drop in Featured Snippets in MozCast appears to be genuine, the impact was mostly on much shorter, more competitive terms and specific industry categories. For those in YMYL categories, it definitely makes good sense to examine the impact 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 after that lowers the volume. As Google ends up being more confident in the quality of their Included Bit algorithms, they might turn that volume back up. I definitely do not expect Featured Bits to disappear whenever soon, and they're still extremely prevalent in longer, natural-language questions.
Google is presuming a "What is/are ...?" question here, but "shared fund" is an extremely uncertain search that could have numerous intents. At the same time, Google was already revealing an Understanding Graph entity in the right-hand column (on desktop), presumably from relied on sources:.
Why show both, specifically if Google has concerns about quality in a classification where they're very sensitive to quality problems? At the exact same time, while it might sting a bit to lose these Included Snippets, consider whether they were truly delivering. While this term may be great for vanity, how typically are individuals at the very start of a search journey-- who may not even understand what a shared fund is-- going to transform into a consumer? Oftentimes, they may be leaping straight to the Knowledge Panel and not even taking the Featured Snippet into account.
For Moz Pro clients, bear in mind that you can quickly track Included Bits from the "SERP Functions" page (under "Rankings" in the left-hand nav) and filter for keywords with Featured Bits. You'll get a report something like this-- search for the scissors icon to see where Included Bits are appearing and whether you (blue) or a rival (red) are capturing them:.
Whatever the impact, one thing remains real-- Google giveth and Google taketh away. Unlike losing a ranking or losing an Included Snippet to a competitor, there's really little you can do to reverse this type of sweeping change. For sites in heavily-impacted verticals, we can only keep track of the circumstance and try to examine our new reality.
Update: Stop by word-count.
I realized that we might look at word-count in the STAT data to check the theory that shorter search questions (which are normally 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 subtlety here-- 1-word queries were clobbered in this update, 2-word queries dropped significantly higher than the STAT average, and 3+- word inquiries were struck much less. Why these inquiries were struck isn't as clear, but the impact on really short questions is clear.