Featured Snippets Drop

Included Snippets Drop

On February 19, MozCast determined a remarkable drop (40% day-over-day) in SERPs with Included Bits, with no immediate indications of healing. Here's a two-week view (February 10-23):.

Are we losing our minds?

After the year we have actually all had, it's constantly great to examine our sanity. In this case, other data sets showed a drop on the very same date, however the severity of the drop differed considerably. I checked our STAT data across desktop questions (en-US seo agency only)-- over 2 million everyday SERPs-- and saw the following:.

While mobile SERPs in STAT revealed higher general frequency, the pattern was really similar, with a 9% day-over-day-drop on February 19 and an overall drop of about 12% considering that February 10. Keep in mind that, while there is substantial overlap, the desktop and mobile data sets may contain various search expressions. While the desktop information 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) towards shorter, more competitive expressions, whereas STAT consists of much more "long-tail" phrases. This explains the total higher prevalence in STAT, as longer phrases tend to consist of questions 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, presumably, more competitive terms? While some changes effect industry classifications likewise, the Featured Bit loss revealed a remarkable range of effect:.

Competitive health care terms lost more than two-thirds of their Featured Snippets. It ends up that many 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 frequency of Featured Bits, Finance SERPs also saw enormous losses on February 19. Some high-volume examples include:.

pension.

danger management.

mutual funds.

roth ira.

investment.

Like the Health classification, these terms have an Understanding Panel in the right-hand column on desktop, with some standard info (mainly from Wikipedia/Wikidata). Again, these are competitive "head" terms, where Google was showing numerous SERP functions prior to February 19.

Both Health and Financing search phrases line up carefully with so-called YMYL (Your Cash or Your Life) material locations, which, in Google's own words "... might possibly impact an individual's future joy, health, financial stability, or security." These are areas where Google is plainly concerned about the quality of the responses they offer.

What about passage indexing?

Could this be tied to the "passage indexing" upgrade that rolled out around February 10? While there's a lot we still do not learn about the effect of that upgrade, and while that upgrade impacted rankings and likely impacted natural bits of all types, there's no factor to think that upgrade would impact whether or not an Included Snippet is shown for any given query. While the timelines overlap a little, these events are more than likely separate.

Is the snippet sky falling?

While the 40% drop in Featured Snippets in MozCast seems real, the impact was mostly on shorter, more competitive terms and particular market categories. For those in YMYL classifications, it definitely makes good sense to evaluate the influence on your rankings and search traffic.

Usually speaking, this is a common pattern with SERP functions-- Google ramps them up over time, then reaches a threshold where quality begins to suffer, and then lowers the volume. As Google becomes more confident in the quality of their Included Snippet algorithms, they may turn that volume back up. I certainly do not anticipate Included Bits to vanish any time quickly, and they're still very common in longer, natural-language questions.

Consider, too, that a few of these Included Snippets may just have been redundant. Prior to February 19, someone looking for "mutual fund" might have seen this Featured Snippet:.

Google is presuming a "What is/are ...?" question here, however "mutual fund" is a highly uncertain search that could have multiple intents. At the same time, Google was currently revealing a Knowledge Graph entity in the right-hand column (on desktop), probably from trusted sources:.

At the same time, while it might sting a bit to lose these Featured Bits, consider whether they were actually providing. In lots of cases, they may be jumping straight to the Knowledge Panel and not even taking the Included Bit into account.

For Moz Pro customers, remember that you can quickly track Included 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-- search for the scissors icon to see where Included Snippets are appearing and whether you (blue) or a rival (red) are capturing them:.

Whatever the impact, something 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 kind of sweeping change. For sites in heavily-impacted verticals, we can only monitor the scenario and attempt to evaluate our new reality.

Update: Drop by word-count.

I understood that we might look at word-count in the STAT data to check the theory that much shorter search questions (which are generally both more competitive and more uncertain) 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 queries were clobbered in this update, 2-word inquiries dropped considerably greater than the STAT average, and 3+- word queries were struck much less. Why these inquiries were struck isn't as clear, but the impact on very short questions is clear.