Included Snippets Drop
On February 19, MozCast determined a dramatic drop (40% day-over-day) in SERPs with Featured Snippets, without any immediate 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 good to check our sanity. In this case, other data sets revealed a drop on the exact same date, however the intensity of the drop varied drastically. So, I examined our STAT information throughout desktop questions (en-US just)-- 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 a total drop of about 12% since February 10. Keep in mind that, while there is significant overlap, the desktop and mobile data sets may include different search phrases. While the desktop information set is currently about 2.2 M daily SERPs, mobile is closer to 1.7 M.
Note that the MozCast 10K keywords are skewed (deliberately) toward shorter, more competitive expressions, whereas STAT includes a lot more "long-tail" expressions. This describes the general greater prevalence in STAT, as longer phrases tend to include concerns and other natural-language inquiries that are most likely to drive Featured Snippets.
Why the big difference?
What's driving the 40% drop in MozCast and, most likely, more competitive terms? Things first: we've hand-verified a number of these losses, and there is no proof of measurement mistake. One useful element of the 10K MozCast keywords is that they're uniformly divided throughout 20 historic Google Advertisements categories. While some modifications impact market categories similarly, the Featured Snippet loss revealed a significant variety of impact:.
Competitive health care terms lost more than two-thirds of their Featured Snippets. It ends up that many of these terms had other popular functions, 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 Bits, Finance SERPs likewise saw enormous losses on February 19. Some high-volume examples include:.
pension.
risk management.mutual funds.
investment.
Like the Health classification, these terms have a Knowledge Panel in the right-hand column on desktop, with some basic information (primarily from Wikipedia/Wikidata). Once again, these are competitive "head" terms, where Google was displaying numerous SERP features prior to February 19.Both Health and Financing search phrases line up carefully with so-called YMYL (Your Cash or Your Life) content areas, which, in Google's own words "... might possibly affect an individual's future happiness, health, monetary stability, or security." These are areas 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" update that presented around February 10? While there's a lot we still don't understand about the impact of that upgrade, and while that upgrade affected rankings and most likely impacted natural bits of all types, there's no reason to think that update would impact whether or not an Included Snippet is shown for any provided question. While the timelines overlap somewhat, these occasions are more than likely different.
Is the snippet sky falling?
While the 40% drop in https://anotepad.com/notes/k5j5b4f9 Featured Snippets in MozCast seems genuine, the effect was mainly on shorter, more competitive terms and specific market categories. For those in YMYL categories, it definitely makes good sense to evaluate the influence on your rankings and search traffic.
Generally speaking, this is a common pattern with SERP features-- Google ramps them up over time, then reaches a threshold where quality starts to suffer, and after that lowers the volume. As Google becomes more confident in the quality of their Included Snippet algorithms, they might turn that volume back up. I definitely do not expect Included Snippets to vanish whenever quickly, and they're still extremely common in longer, natural-language queries.
Think about, too, that a few of these Featured Snippets may just have 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 "shared fund" is an extremely uncertain search that could have several intents. At the very same time, Google was already showing a Knowledge Chart entity in the right-hand column (on desktop), most likely from relied on sources:.
At the very same time, while it may sting a bit to lose these Included Bits, think about whether they were really providing. In many cases, they might be jumping straight to the Understanding Panel and not even taking the Featured Bit into account.
For Moz Pro clients, keep in mind that you can quickly track Featured Bits from the "SERP Features" 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 Featured Bits are appearing and whether you (blue) or a competitor (red) are catching them:.
Whatever the effect, one thing stays true-- Google giveth and Google taketh away. Unlike losing a ranking or losing an Included Snippet to a competitor, there's really little you can do to reverse this type of sweeping change. For websites in heavily-impacted verticals, we can just keep an eye on the circumstance and try to assess our new reality.
Update: Drop by word-count.
I realized that we might take a look at word-count in the STAT information to evaluate the theory that shorter search questions (which are typically both more competitive and more uncertain) were struck harder by this upgrade. Here's the breakdown of STAT's 2M desktop (en-US) keywords ...
