Included Snippets Drop
On February 19, MozCast measured a remarkable drop (40% day-over-day) in SERPs with Featured Snippets, without any immediate 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 constantly good to examine our sanity. In this case, other data sets showed a drop on the exact same date, however the intensity of the drop varied considerably. I checked our STAT information throughout desktop questions (en-US only)-- over two million everyday SERPs-- and saw the following:.
While mobile SERPs in STAT showed greater overall occurrence, the pattern was extremely comparable, with a 9% day-over-day-drop on February 19 and a total drop of about 12% considering that February 10. Keep in mind that, while there is substantial overlap, the desktop and mobile data sets may include various search phrases. While the desktop information 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 manipulated (deliberately) towards shorter, more competitive expressions, whereas STAT includes much more "long-tail" expressions. This describes the overall higher frequency in STAT, as longer expressions tend to consist of concerns and other natural-language queries that are most likely to drive Featured Snippets.
Why the big difference?
What's driving the 40% drop in MozCast and, presumably, more competitive terms? Things first: we've 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 equally divided across 20 historical Google Advertisements classifications. While some modifications effect industry categories similarly, the Featured Bit loss showed a remarkable series of effect:.
Competitive healthcare 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 Featured Bits in the Health category:.
diabetes.
lupus.
autism.
fibromyalgia.
acne.
While Finance had a much lower preliminary frequency of Included Bits, Finance SERPs also saw massive losses on February 19. Some high-volume examples include:.
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 fundamental information (primarily from Wikipedia/Wikidata). Again, these are competitive "head" terms, where Google was displaying multiple SERP features prior to February 19.
Both Health and Financing search expressions align closely with so-called YMYL (Your Cash or Your Life) content locations, which, in Google's own words "... might potentially impact a person's future joy, health, financial stability, or security." These are areas where Google is plainly worried about the quality of the responses they offer.
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 do not understand about the effect of that upgrade, and while that upgrade impacted rankings and highly likely impacted natural snippets of all types, there's no reason to believe that upgrade would impact whether or not an Included Bit is displayed for any provided inquiry. While the timelines overlap slightly, these events are more than likely separate.
Is the bit sky falling?
While the 40% drop in Featured Snippets in MozCast seems real, the effect was primarily on shorter, more competitive terms and particular industry categories. For those in YMYL categories, it definitely makes good sense to evaluate the influence on your rankings and search traffic.
Normally speaking, this is a typical pattern with SERP features-- Google ramps them up with 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 Featured Snippet algorithms, they may turn that volume back up. I certainly don't anticipate Included Bits to vanish at any time quickly, and they're still very widespread in longer, natural-language questions.
Consider, too, that a few of these Featured Snippets may just have been redundant. Prior gold coast wordpress website to February 19, somebody searching for "shared fund" might have seen this Included Snippet:.
Google is assuming a "What is/are ...?" concern here, however "shared fund" is an extremely unclear search that might have several intents. At the very same time, Google was currently revealing a Knowledge Graph entity in the right-hand column (on desktop), most likely from trusted sources:.
At the very same time, while it might sting a bit to lose these Included Bits, think about whether they were really delivering. In many cases, they may be leaping straight to the Knowledge Panel and not even taking the Featured Snippet into account.
For Moz Pro customers, bear in mind that you can quickly track Featured Bits from the "SERP Functions" page (under "Rankings" in the left-hand nav) and filter for keywords with Featured Snippets. You'll get a report something like this-- try to find the scissors icon to see where Included Bits are appearing and whether you (blue) or a competitor (red) are capturing them:.
Whatever the effect, one thing remains true-- Google giveth and Google taketh away. Unlike losing a ranking or losing an Included Bit to a rival, there's really little you can do to reverse this kind of sweeping modification. For sites in heavily-impacted verticals, we can just keep an eye on the circumstance and attempt to evaluate our new truth.
Update: Drop by word-count.
I realized that we could take a look at word-count in the STAT data to test the theory that shorter search queries (which are typically both more competitive and more ambiguous) were struck harder by this update. 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 queries dropped considerably higher than the STAT average, and 3+- word inquiries were struck much less. Why these inquiries were struck isn't as clear, however the influence on very short queries is clear.