Featured Snippets Drop
On February 19, MozCast measured a dramatic drop (40% day-over-day) in SERPs with Featured Bits, without any instant 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 always good to inspect our sanity. In this case, other information sets revealed a drop on the very same date, but the severity of the drop differed dramatically. So, I inspected our STAT information across desktop inquiries (en-US just)-- over 2 million daily SERPs-- and saw the following:.
While mobile SERPs in STAT showed greater general prevalence, the pattern was really 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 data sets might consist of 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 manipulated (intentionally) toward shorter, more competitive phrases, whereas STAT includes much more "long-tail" expressions. This explains the total greater prevalence in STAT, as longer expressions tend to include questions and other natural-language queries that are most likely to drive Featured Snippets.
Why the huge difference?
What's driving the 40% drop in MozCast and, most likely, more competitive terms? Things first: we have actually hand-verified a number of these losses, and there is no proof of measurement mistake. One practical aspect of the 10K MozCast keywords is that they're uniformly divided throughout 20 historical Google Advertisements categories. While some changes impact industry categories likewise, the Featured Snippet loss revealed a Discover more here significant series of effect:.
Competitive health care terms lost more than two-thirds of their Included Bits. It ends up that a lot of these terms had other prominent features, 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 prevalence of Featured Snippets, Financing SERPs also saw massive losses on February 19. Some high-volume examples include:.
pension.
shared funds.
roth individual retirement account.investment.
Like the Health classification, these terms have an Understanding Panel in the right-hand column on desktop, with some standard details (primarily from Wikipedia/Wikidata). Again, these are competitive "head" terms, where Google was showing several SERP features prior to February 19.Both Health and Financing search phrases align carefully with so-called YMYL (Your Cash or Your Life) material areas, which, in Google's own words "... might possibly impact 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 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 do not understand about the impact of that upgrade, and while that upgrade impacted rankings and very likely affected natural bits of all types, there's no factor to believe that upgrade would impact whether a Featured Snippet is shown for any given question. While the timelines overlap somewhat, these events are probably different.
Is the bit sky falling?
While the 40% drop in Featured Snippets in MozCast seems genuine, the effect was primarily on much shorter, more competitive terms and specific industry classifications. For those in YMYL categories, it definitely makes sense to assess the influence on your rankings and search traffic.
Generally speaking, this is a common pattern with SERP features-- Google ramps them up with time, then reaches a threshold where quality starts to suffer, and after that reduces the volume. As Google becomes more positive in the quality of their Featured Bit algorithms, they might turn that volume back up. I definitely do not expect Included Bits to vanish any time soon, and they're still extremely prevalent in longer, natural-language questions.
Consider, too, that a few of these Featured Snippets may simply have actually been redundant. Prior to February 19, someone searching for "mutual fund" might have seen this Included Snippet:.
Google is presuming a "What is/are ...?" concern here, but "shared fund" is an extremely unclear search that could have multiple intents. At the same time, Google was currently showing an Understanding Graph entity in the right-hand column (on desktop), probably from trusted sources:.
Why display both, particularly if Google has concerns about quality in a category where they're very conscious quality issues? At the very same time, while it might sting a bit to lose these Featured Bits, consider whether they were really delivering. While this term may be great for vanity, how typically are people at the very beginning of a search journey-- who may not even know what a mutual fund is-- going to convert into a customer? Oftentimes, they might be leaping straight to the Understanding Panel and not even taking the Included Bit into account.
For Moz Pro clients, bear in mind that you can easily track Featured Snippets from the "SERP Features" page (under "Rankings" in the left-hand nav) and filter for keywords with Included Snippets. You'll get a report something like this-- look for the scissors icon to see where Featured Snippets are appearing and whether you (blue) or a rival (red) are capturing them:.
Whatever the effect, one thing stays true-- Google giveth and Google taketh away. Unlike losing a ranking or losing a Featured Snippet to a competitor, there's really little you can do to reverse this sort of sweeping change. For websites in heavily-impacted verticals, we can only keep track of the scenario and attempt to assess our brand-new reality.
Update: Stop by word-count.
I realized that we might take a look at word-count in the STAT data to test the theory that shorter search questions (which are typically both more competitive and more unclear) were struck harder by this upgrade. Here's the breakdown of STAT's 2M desktop (en-US) keywords ...There's very little nuance here-- 1-word questions were clobbered in this update, 2-word inquiries dropped substantially higher than the STAT average, and 3+- word queries were struck much less. Why these questions were struck isn't as clear, however the effect on very short questions is clear.