Featured Snippets Drop
On February 19, MozCast measured a significant drop (40% day-over-day) in SERPs with Featured Bits, without any instant indications of recovery. Here's a two-week view (February 10-23):.
Are we losing our minds?
After the year we've all had, it's always good to check our peace of mind. In this case, other data sets revealed a drop on the exact same date, however the seriousness of the drop varied considerably. So, I checked our STAT information throughout desktop queries (en-US just)-- over 2 million everyday SERPs-- and saw the following:.
While mobile SERPs in STAT revealed higher general frequency, the pattern was really comparable, with a 9% day-over-day-drop on February 19 and a total drop of about 12% because February 10. Note that, while there is substantial overlap, the desktop and mobile information sets might contain different search phrases. While the desktop data 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 much shorter, more competitive expressions, whereas STAT includes many more "long-tail" phrases. This discusses the overall higher frequency in STAT, as longer expressions tend to include questions and other natural-language questions 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? First things first: we have actually hand-verified a number of these losses, and there is no evidence of measurement mistake. One helpful element of the 10K MozCast keywords is that they're equally divided across 20 historic Google Ads classifications. While some changes effect market categories similarly, the Featured Bit loss revealed a dramatic series 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 features, such as Medical Knowledge Panels. Here are some high-volume terms that lost Included Snippets in the Health category:.
diabetes.
lupus.
autism.fibromyalgia.
acne.While Finance had a much lower initial occurrence of Included Snippets, Finance SERPs likewise saw huge losses on February 19. Some high-volume examples consist of:.
pension.
danger management.shared funds.
roth ira.investment.
Like the Health category, these terms have a Knowledge Panel in the right-hand column on desktop, with some basic info (primarily from Wikipedia/Wikidata). Once again, these are competitive "head" terms, where Google was displaying several 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 areas where Google is plainly worried about the quality of the answers they provide.
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 understand about the impact of that upgrade, and while that upgrade impacted rankings and most likely affected organic snippets of all types, there's no reason to believe that upgrade would impact whether or not an Included Snippet is displayed for any offered query. While the timelines overlap a little, these occasions are more than likely different.
Is the bit sky falling?
While the 40% drop in Featured Snippets in MozCast seems real, the effect was primarily on much shorter, more competitive terms and specific industry categories. For those in YMYL categories, it certainly makes good sense to assess the effect on your rankings and search traffic.
Normally speaking, this is a typical pattern with SERP functions-- Google ramps them up in time, then reaches a limit where quality starts to suffer, and then reduces the volume. As Google ends up being more confident in the quality of their Featured Bit algorithms, they may turn that volume back up. I certainly don't anticipate Featured Snippets to disappear whenever soon, and they're still extremely prevalent in longer, natural-language inquiries.
Think about, too, that a few of these Featured Snippets may simply have been redundant. Prior to February 19, someone searching for "shared fund" may have seen this Included Snippet:.
Google is presuming a "What is/are ...?" question here, but "shared fund" is a highly uncertain search that could have multiple intents. At the exact same time, Google was currently revealing an Understanding Graph entity in the right-hand column (on desktop), presumably from relied on sources:.
Why show both, specifically if Google has issues about quality in a category where they're very sensitive to quality problems? At the same time, while it may sting a bit to lose these Included Snippets, consider whether they were actually 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 know what a shared fund is-- going to transform into a client? Click to find out more In a lot of cases, they might be leaping straight to the Knowledge Panel and not even taking the Included Snippet into account.
For Moz Pro consumers, bear in mind that you can quickly track Included Snippets 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-- try to find the scissors icon to see where Included Snippets are appearing and whether you (blue) or a rival (red) are capturing them:.
Whatever the effect, something remains true-- Google giveth and Google taketh away. Unlike losing a ranking or losing an Included Bit to a rival, there's extremely little you can do to reverse this type of sweeping change. For sites in heavily-impacted verticals, we can only monitor the circumstance and try to evaluate our new truth.
Update: Drop by word-count.
I understood that we could look at word-count in the STAT data to evaluate the theory that shorter search questions (which are normally both more competitive and more unclear) were struck 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 update, 2-word queries dropped significantly higher than the STAT average, and 3+- word queries were struck much less. Why these queries were hit isn't as clear, however the effect on extremely short queries is clear.