Featured Snippets Drop
On February 19, MozCast measured a significant drop (40% day-over-day) in SERPs with Featured Bits, with no instant 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 constantly great to check our sanity. In this case, other data sets showed a drop on the exact same date, but the severity of the drop differed drastically. So, I examined our STAT data across desktop queries (en-US only)-- over two million day-to-day SERPs-- and saw the following:.
While mobile SERPs in STAT showed greater general frequency, the pattern was extremely comparable, with a 9% day-over-day-drop on February 19 and an overall drop of about 12% considering that February 10. This explains the overall higher frequency in STAT, as longer phrases tend to consist of concerns and other natural-language queries that are more likely to drive Featured Snippets.
Why the huge distinction?
Competitive health care terms lost more than two-thirds of their Featured Snippets. It ends up that a number 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 classification:.
diabetes.
lupus.
autism.fibromyalgia.
acne.While Finance had a much lower initial occurrence of Featured Snippets, Finance SERPs likewise saw massive losses on February 19. Some high-volume examples consist of:.
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 standard information (primarily from Wikipedia/Wikidata). Once again, these are competitive "head" terms, where Google was showing multiple SERP functions prior to February 19.Both Health and Financing search phrases align carefully with so-called YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) material locations, which, in Google's own words "... might possibly affect a person's future joy, health, monetary stability, or security." These are areas where Google is clearly worried about the quality of the answers they offer.
What about passage indexing?
Could this be tied to the "passage indexing" update that presented around February 10? While there's a lot we still do not know about the impact of that update, and while that update affected rankings and likely affected natural bits of all types, there's no factor to think that update would impact whether a Featured Snippet is shown for any provided inquiry. While the timelines overlap somewhat, these occasions are probably different.
Is the bit sky falling?
While the 40% drop in Featured Snippets in MozCast seems genuine, the effect was mainly on much shorter, more competitive terms and specific industry categories. For those in YMYL categories, it definitely makes sense to examine the effect on your rankings and search traffic.
Typically speaking, this is a typical pattern with SERP functions-- Google ramps them up over time, then reaches a limit where quality starts to suffer, and after that decreases the volume. As Google becomes more confident in the quality of their Included Snippet algorithms, they might turn that volume back up. I certainly do not anticipate Featured Bits to disappear whenever quickly, and they're still really common in longer, natural-language queries.
Think about, too, that a few of these Featured Snippets might simply have actually been redundant. Prior to February 19, someone searching for "shared fund" may have seen this Featured Snippet:.
Google is presuming a "What is/are ...?" concern here, but "mutual fund" is a highly unclear search that could have numerous intents. At the exact same time, Google was currently showing a Knowledge Chart entity in the right-hand column (on desktop), probably from relied on sources:.
At the exact same time, while it might sting a bit to lose these Featured Bits, think about whether they were actually delivering. In numerous cases, they may be leaping straight to the Understanding Panel and not even taking the Included Snippet into account.
For Moz Pro clients, keep in mind 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-- look for the scissors icon to see where Included Bits are appearing and whether you (blue) or a competitor (red) are capturing them:.
Whatever the effect, something stays 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 kind of sweeping modification. For sites in heavily-impacted verticals, we can only monitor the circumstance and attempt to evaluate our new truth.
Update: Visit word-count.
I understood that we might look at word-count in the STAT information to check the theory that much shorter search questions (which are generally both more competitive and more unclear) were hit harder by this update. 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 upgrade, 2-word questions dropped substantially greater than the STAT average, and 3+- word inquiries were hit much less. Why these queries were hit isn't as clear, but the effect on very short questions is clear.
