Featured Snippets Drop
On February 19, MozCast measured a significant drop (40% day-over-day) in SERPs with Featured Snippets, without any instant signs 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 good to examine our peace of mind. In this case, other information sets showed a drop on the same date, but the seriousness of the drop varied considerably. I checked our STAT information across desktop inquiries (en-US just)-- over two million daily SERPs-- and saw the following:.
While mobile SERPs in STAT showed 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% considering that February 10. Note that, while there is significant overlap, the desktop and mobile information sets might include different search expressions. While the desktop information set is presently about 2.2 M daily SERPs, mobile is closer to 1.7 M.
Note that the MozCast 10K keywords are manipulated (intentionally) toward much shorter, more competitive phrases, whereas STAT includes many more "long-tail" expressions. This describes the total greater occurrence in STAT, as longer expressions tend to include concerns and other natural-language inquiries that are more likely to drive Featured Snippets.
Why the big difference?
What's driving the 40% drop in MozCast and, presumably, more competitive terms? While some changes impact market classifications likewise, the Featured Bit loss revealed a remarkable range of effect:.
Competitive healthcare terms lost more than two-thirds of their Included Snippets. It ends up that a number 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 category:.
diabetes.
lupus.
autism.fibromyalgia.
acne.While Finance had a much lower preliminary occurrence of Featured Bits, Financing SERPs likewise saw huge losses on February 19. Some high-volume examples include:.
pension.
danger management.shared funds.
roth ira.investment.
Like the Health classification, these terms have an Understanding Panel in the right-hand column on desktop, with some standard information (mostly from Wikipedia/Wikidata). Again, these are competitive "head" terms, where Google was showing multiple SERP functions prior to February 19.Both Health and Finance search phrases align carefully with so-called YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) material areas, which, in Google's own words "... could possibly affect a person's future joy, health, financial stability, or safety." These are locations where Google is clearly concerned about the quality of the answers they offer.
What about passage indexing?
Could this be connected to the "passage indexing" update that rolled out around February 10? While there's a lot we still do not understand about the impact of that update, and while that update affected rankings and most likely impacted natural snippets of all types, there's no reason to think that update would impact whether a Featured Snippet is shown for any provided inquiry. While the timelines overlap slightly, these events are most likely different.
Is the snippet sky falling?
Consider, too, that a few of these Featured Bits may simply have been redundant. Prior to February 19, someone looking for "mutual fund" might have seen this Featured Snippet:.
Google is assuming a "What is/are ...?" question here, but "mutual fund" is a highly unclear search that might have several intents. At the exact same time, Google was currently revealing a Knowledge Chart entity in the right-hand column (on desktop), most likely from relied on sources:.
Why display both, specifically if Google has concerns about quality in a category where they're extremely sensitive to quality concerns? At the very same time, while it may sting a bit to lose these Included Snippets, think about whether they were actually providing. While this term may be fantastic for vanity, how frequently are people at the very beginning of a search journey-- who may not even understand what a shared fund is-- going to transform into a consumer? In a lot of cases, they might be leaping straight to the Knowledge Panel and not even taking the Featured Snippet into account.
For Moz Pro consumers, bear in mind that you can quickly track Included Snippets from the "SERP Features" page (under "Rankings" in the left-hand nav) and filter for keywords with Featured Snippets. You'll get a report something like this-- try to find the scissors icon to see where Included Bits are appearing and whether you (blue) or a rival (red) are recording them:.
Whatever the effect, one thing stays real-- Google giveth and Google taketh away. Unlike losing a ranking or losing an Included Bit to a competitor, there's very 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 brand-new reality.
Update: Stop by word-count.
I realized that we might take a look at word-count in the STAT information to test the theory that shorter search inquiries (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 not much nuance here-- 1-word queries were clobbered in this upgrade, 2-word queries dropped substantially higher than the STAT average, and 3+- word queries were hit much less. Why these inquiries were struck isn't as clear, but the impact on really short inquiries is clear.