Featured Snippets Drop
On February 19, MozCast determined a dramatic drop (40% day-over-day) in SERPs with Featured Bits, 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 always great to check our sanity. In this case, other information sets showed a drop on the very same date, however the seriousness of the drop differed drastically. So, I examined our STAT data across desktop queries (en-US only)-- over 2 million daily SERPs-- and saw the following:.
While mobile SERPs in STAT revealed greater general prevalence, the pattern was very similar, with a 9% day-over-day-drop on February 19 and an overall drop of about 12% since February 10. Note that, while there is substantial overlap, the desktop and mobile data sets might consist of various search expressions. While the desktop data set is currently about 2.2 M daily SERPs, mobile is closer to 1.7 M.
Note that the MozCast 10K keywords are manipulated (deliberately) toward shorter, more competitive phrases, whereas STAT includes much more "long-tail" phrases. This describes the total higher occurrence in STAT, as longer expressions tend to include concerns and other natural-language questions that are most likely to drive Featured Snippets.
Why the big distinction?
What's driving the 40% drop in MozCast and, most likely, more competitive terms? While some modifications impact industry categories similarly, the Featured Snippet loss showed a dramatic variety of effect:.
Competitive healthcare terms lost more than two-thirds of their Featured Bits. It turns out that a number of these terms had other prominent functions, such as Medical Knowledge Panels. Here are some high-volume terms that lost Included Snippets in the Health classification:.
diabetes.
lupus.
autism.
fibromyalgia.
acne.While Financing had a much lower preliminary occurrence of Featured Snippets, Finance SERPs likewise saw enormous losses on February 19. Some high-volume examples consist of:.
pension.
threat management.mutual funds.
roth individual retirement account.investment.
Like the Health category, these terms have an Understanding Panel in the right-hand column on desktop, with some standard information (mainly from Wikipedia/Wikidata). Again, these are competitive "head" terms, where Google was showing multiple SERP features prior to February 19.Both Health and Finance search phrases align closely with so-called YMYL (Your Cash or Your Life) material locations, which, in Google's own words "... might possibly affect an individual's future joy, health, monetary stability, or safety." These are locations where Google is plainly concerned about the quality of the responses they provide.
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 do not learn about the effect of that upgrade, and while that update impacted rankings and highly likely affected organic bits of all types, there's no reason to believe that update would affect whether or not a Featured Bit is displayed for any provided query. While the timelines overlap a little, these occasions are most likely different.
Is the snippet sky falling?
Google is assuming a "What is/are ...?" question here, but "mutual fund" is a highly uncertain search that might have numerous intents. At the same time, Google was currently showing an Understanding Graph entity in the right-hand column (on desktop), presumably from trusted sources:.
Why display both, especially if Google has concerns about quality in a classification where they're extremely sensitive to quality issues? At the very same time, while it might sting a bit to lose these Included Snippets, consider whether they were truly delivering. While this term may be excellent for vanity, how typically are individuals at the very start 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 jumping straight to the Understanding Panel and not even taking the Included Snippet into account.
For Moz Pro clients, bear in mind that you can easily track Included Snippets from the "SERP Features" page (under "Rankings" in the left-hand seo agency nav) and filter for keywords with Featured Bits. 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 catching them:.
Whatever the impact, something stays real-- 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 kind of sweeping change. For sites in heavily-impacted verticals, we can just keep track of the circumstance and attempt to examine our new reality.
Update: Drop by word-count.
I recognized that we could take a look at word-count in the STAT information to check the theory that shorter search questions (which are normally both more competitive and more uncertain) were struck harder by this upgrade. 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 inquiries were hit much less. Why these inquiries were hit isn't as clear, but the effect on extremely short queries is clear.