Featured Snippets Drop
On February 19, MozCast determined a significant 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 constantly excellent to inspect our sanity. In this case, other information sets revealed a drop on the very same date, however the intensity of the drop varied considerably. So, I examined our STAT information across desktop queries (en-US only)-- over 2 million daily SERPs-- and saw the following:.
While mobile SERPs in STAT revealed greater total prevalence, the pattern was very comparable, with a 9% day-over-day-drop on February 19 and a total drop of about 12% given that February 10. Keep in mind that, while there is substantial overlap, the desktop and mobile information sets might include different search phrases. While the desktop data set is presently about 2.2 M everyday SERPs, mobile is closer to 1.7 M.
Note that the MozCast 10K keywords are skewed (intentionally) toward shorter, more competitive expressions, whereas STAT includes many more "long-tail" phrases. This discusses the total greater occurrence in STAT, as longer expressions tend to consist of concerns and other natural-language questions that are most likely to drive Featured Snippets.
Why the big difference?
What's driving the 40% drop in MozCast and, presumably, more competitive terms? Things first: we've hand-verified a number of these losses, and there is no proof of measurement mistake. One helpful element of the 10K MozCast keywords is that they're evenly divided throughout 20 historical Google Advertisements classifications. While some changes impact industry categories likewise, the Featured Snippet loss showed a significant series of impact:.
Competitive health care terms lost more than two-thirds of their Included Snippets. It ends up that a number of these terms had other popular features, such as Medical Understanding Panels. Here are some high-volume terms that lost Featured Bits in the Health classification:.
diabetes.
lupus.
autism.fibromyalgia.
While Financing had a much lower initial prevalence of Featured Bits, Finance SERPs likewise saw enormous losses on February 19. Some high-volume examples include:.
pension.
threat management.shared funds.
roth ira.financial investment.
Like the Health category, these terms have an Understanding 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 displaying multiple SERP functions prior to February 19.Both Health and Finance search expressions align carefully with so-called YMYL (Your Cash or Your Life) content locations, which, in Google's own words "... could potentially affect an individual's future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety." These are areas where Google is clearly worried about the quality of the answers they supply.
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 know about the effect of that update, and while that upgrade impacted rankings and likely affected natural snippets of all types, there's no factor to believe that update would affect whether a Featured Bit is shown for any offered question. While the timelines overlap slightly, these occasions are more than likely separate.
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 industry categories. For those in YMYL categories, it definitely makes good sense to examine the influence on your rankings and search traffic.
Consider, too, that some of these Included Bits may simply have actually been redundant. Prior to February 19, someone searching for "shared fund" might have seen this Featured Snippet:.
Google is presuming a "What is/are ...?" question here, but "mutual fund" is a highly unclear search that could have multiple intents. At the exact same time, Google was currently revealing a Knowledge Graph entity in the right-hand column (on desktop), probably from trusted sources:.
Why show both, particularly if Google has issues about quality in a category where they're extremely sensitive to quality problems? At the same time, while it might sting a bit to lose these Click for info Featured Bits, think about whether they were truly delivering. While this term may be excellent for vanity, how frequently are people at the very beginning of a search journey-- who may not even understand what a mutual fund is-- going to convert into a consumer? In a lot of cases, they might be leaping straight to the Understanding Panel and not even taking the Featured Bit into account.
For Moz Pro customers, bear in mind that you can easily track Included Bits 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 Snippets are appearing and whether you (blue) or a competitor (red) are capturing 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 extremely little you can do to reverse this sort of sweeping change. For sites in heavily-impacted verticals, we can only monitor the situation and try to examine our new truth.
Update: Come by word-count.
I realized that we might take a look at word-count in the STAT data to evaluate the theory that shorter search questions (which are typically 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 not much nuance here-- 1-word queries were clobbered in this upgrade, 2-word queries dropped considerably higher than the STAT average, and 3+- word questions were struck much less. Why these queries were hit isn't as clear, but the influence on very brief queries is clear.