Included Snippets Drop
On February 19, MozCast determined a remarkable 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 examine our sanity. In this case, other data sets showed a drop on the very same date, however the seriousness of the drop differed significantly. So, I inspected our STAT information throughout desktop queries (en-US just)-- over 2 million day-to-day SERPs-- and saw the following:.
While mobile SERPs in STAT revealed greater general frequency, the pattern was very 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 substantial overlap, the desktop and mobile data sets might include various search expressions. While the desktop data set is currently about 2.2 M day-to-day SERPs, mobile is closer to 1.7 M.
Note that the MozCast 10K keywords are skewed (intentionally) towards shorter, more competitive phrases, whereas STAT consists of a lot more "long-tail" phrases. This explains the general greater frequency 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 distinction?
What's driving the 40% drop in MozCast and, probably, more competitive terms? First things first: we've hand-verified a number of these losses, and there is no proof of measurement error. One useful element of the 10K MozCast keywords is that they're uniformly divided across 20 historical Google Ads categories. While some modifications effect industry categories likewise, the Featured Snippet loss revealed a significant series of effect:.
Competitive healthcare terms lost more than two-thirds of their Included Snippets. It ends up that many of these terms had other prominent functions, such as Medical Understanding Panels. Here are some high-volume terms that lost Featured Snippets in the Health classification:.
lupus.
autism.fibromyalgia.
acne.While Finance had a much lower preliminary prevalence of Included Snippets, Finance SERPs likewise saw huge losses on February 19. Some high-volume examples include:.
pension.
risk management.shared funds.
roth individual retirement account.financial investment.
Like the Health category, these terms have a Knowledge Panel in the right-hand column on desktop, with some fundamental info (mainly from Wikipedia/Wikidata). Again, these are competitive "head" terms, where Google was showing numerous SERP features prior to February 19.Both Health and Finance search phrases align carefully with so-called YMYL (Your Cash or Your Life) content areas, which, in Google's own words "... could potentially impact a person's future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety." These are locations where Google is plainly worried about the quality of the responses 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 know about the impact of that upgrade, and while that update impacted rankings and very likely impacted natural snippets of all types, there's no reason to think that upgrade would affect whether or not an Included Bit is displayed for any provided query. While the timelines overlap slightly, these events are most likely different.
Is the bit sky falling?
While the 40% drop in Featured Snippets in MozCast seems real, the effect was mostly on shorter, more competitive terms and specific industry classifications. For those in YMYL classifications, it definitely makes good sense to examine the impact on your rankings and search traffic.
Usually speaking, this is a common pattern with SERP features-- Google ramps them up in time, then reaches a limit where quality begins to suffer, and after that lowers the volume. As Google ends up being more positive in the quality of their Included Bit algorithms, they might turn that volume back up. I certainly do not anticipate Included Snippets to vanish whenever soon, and they're still very common in longer, natural-language queries.
Consider, too, that some of these Included Snippets may simply have actually been redundant. Prior to February 19, someone looking for "shared Great post to read fund" might have seen this Included Bit:.
Google is presuming a "What is/are ...?" question here, but "mutual fund" is an extremely ambiguous search that might have multiple intents. At the very same time, Google was already revealing an Understanding Graph entity in the right-hand column (on desktop), most likely from relied on sources:.
Why show both, especially if Google has issues about quality in a classification where they're really sensitive to quality issues? At the exact same time, while it might sting a bit to lose these Featured Snippets, think about whether they were truly delivering. While this term may be fantastic for vanity, how typically are individuals at the very beginning of a search journey-- who may not even know what a mutual fund is-- going to convert into a customer? In a lot of cases, they might be jumping straight to the Understanding Panel and not even taking the Featured Bit into account.
For Moz Pro consumers, bear in mind that you can easily track Featured Snippets from the "SERP Functions" page (under "Rankings" in the left-hand nav) and filter for keywords with Included Snippets. You'll get a report something like this-- search for the scissors icon to see where Included Snippets are appearing and whether you (blue) or a rival (red) are catching them:.
Whatever the impact, something remains true-- Google giveth and Google taketh away. Unlike losing a ranking or losing an Included Snippet to a competitor, there's very little you can do to reverse this kind of sweeping change. For websites in heavily-impacted verticals, we can only keep an eye on the circumstance and attempt to evaluate our brand-new truth.
Update: Visit word-count.
I realized that we might look at word-count in the STAT information to evaluate the theory that shorter search queries (which are usually both more competitive and more unclear) were hit harder by this update. 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 questions were struck much less. Why these queries were struck isn't as clear, but the effect on very brief inquiries is clear.