Featured Snippets Drop
On February 19, MozCast determined a remarkable drop (40% day-over-day) in SERPs with Featured Snippets, without any 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 always great to examine our peace of mind. In this case, other information sets revealed a drop on the very same date, but the intensity of the drop differed considerably. 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 frequency, the pattern was very similar, with a 9% day-over-day-drop on February 19 and an overall drop of about 12% considering that February 10. Note that, while there is significant overlap, the desktop and mobile information sets might consist of various search phrases. While the desktop information 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 skewed (deliberately) towards shorter, more competitive expressions, whereas STAT consists of a lot more "long-tail" phrases. This discusses the overall greater prevalence in STAT, as longer phrases tend to consist of concerns and other natural-language inquiries 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? While some modifications impact market categories similarly, the Featured Bit loss showed a remarkable range of effect:.
Competitive health care terms lost more than two-thirds of their Featured Bits. It turns out that a number of these terms had other popular 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 Financing had a much lower preliminary prevalence of Featured Snippets, Financing SERPs also saw massive losses on February 19. Some high-volume examples include:.
pension.
risk 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 details (primarily from Wikipedia/Wikidata). Again, these are competitive "head" terms, where Google was showing multiple SERP digital marketing agency functions prior to February 19.
Both Health and Finance search phrases align closely with so-called YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) material areas, which, in Google's own words "... could potentially affect an individual's future joy, health, financial stability, or security." These are locations 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 don't learn about the effect of that upgrade, and while that upgrade impacted rankings and likely impacted natural bits of all types, there's no factor to believe that update would impact whether a Featured Snippet is shown for any provided inquiry. While the timelines overlap somewhat, these occasions are more than likely different.
Is the snippet sky falling?
While the 40% drop in Featured Snippets in MozCast appears to be genuine, the effect was mostly on shorter, more competitive terms and specific market classifications. For those in YMYL classifications, it certainly makes good sense to evaluate the impact on your rankings and search traffic.
Normally speaking, this is a typical pattern with SERP features-- Google ramps them up in time, then reaches a threshold where quality starts to suffer, and then decreases the volume. As Google becomes more positive in the quality of their Featured Bit algorithms, they may turn that volume back up. I definitely do not expect Featured Snippets to disappear at any time soon, and they're still very common in longer, natural-language questions.
Think about, too, that some of these Featured Snippets may simply have actually been redundant. Prior to February 19, somebody looking for "shared fund" might have seen this Featured Bit:.
Google is presuming a "What is/are ...?" question here, however "shared fund" is an extremely uncertain search that might have several intents. At the same time, Google was currently showing a Knowledge Chart entity in the right-hand column (on desktop), most likely from trusted sources:.
At the very same time, while it may sting a bit to lose these Featured Bits, consider whether they were really delivering. In lots of cases, they might be jumping straight to the Understanding Panel and not even taking the Included Bit into account.
For Moz Pro consumers, remember that you can easily track Included Bits from the "SERP Functions" 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 Included Snippets are appearing and whether you (blue) or a rival (red) are recording them:.
Whatever the effect, something remains true-- Google giveth and Google taketh away. Unlike losing a ranking or losing a Featured Bit to a competitor, there's very little you can do to reverse this type of sweeping change. For sites in heavily-impacted verticals, we can just monitor the circumstance and attempt to assess our brand-new truth.
Update: Drop by word-count.
I recognized that we could look at word-count in the STAT data to evaluate the theory that shorter search inquiries (which are generally 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 not much nuance here-- 1-word queries were clobbered in this upgrade, 2-word inquiries dropped significantly higher than the STAT average, and 3+- word questions were hit much less. Why these questions were struck isn't as clear, but the effect on really brief queries is clear.