Skip to main content

Featured Snippets: Not Gone, Just on Holiday (Apparently)

Posted by Dr-Pete

On February 19, 2021, we measured a dramatic drop in Featured Snippets on Google SERPs in the US. Like any responsible data scientist, I waited to make sure it wasn't a fluke, did my homework, and published when I was sure I was onto something. Then, this happened (30-day view):

C'MON, GOOGLE! I did all these beautiful analyses, found a lovely connection between Featured Snippet losses, YMYL queries, and head terms, and then you go and make me look like a chump?!

Is there anything we can learn from this strange turn of events? Do I really need this stress? Should I just go pour myself a cocktail? Stay tuned for none of these answers and more!

You want more data? Ok, fine, I guess...

Could this recovery be a fluke of the 10,000-keyword MozCast data set? It's unlikely, but let's dot our i's and cross our t's. Here's the Featured Snippet data from the same time period across roughly 2.2M US/desktop keywords in the STAT data set:

So, this gets a lot messier. We saw a significant drop on February 19, followed by a partial recovery, followed by an even larger drop, finally landing (for now) on a total recovery.

Our original study of the drop showed dramatic differences by query length. Here's a breakdown by four word-count buckets for the before and after Featured Snippet prevalence (the data points are February 18, February 19, and March 12):

You can plainly see that the bulk of the losses were in one-word queries, with longer queries showing minor but far less dramatic drops. All query lengths recovered by March 12.

Who really came back from holiday?

If you take two kids on vacation and come back with two kids, it's all good, right? What if the kids who came back weren't the same? What if they were robots? Or clones? Or robot clones?

Is it possible that the pages that were awarded Featured Snippets after the recovery were different from the ones from before the drop? A simple count doesn't tell us the whole story, even if we slice-and-dice it. This turns out to be a complicated problem. First of all, we have to consider that — in addition to the URL of the Featured Snippet changing — a keyword could gain or lose a Featured Snippet entirely. Consider this comparison of pre-drop and post-recovery:

Looking at the keywords in MozCast that had Featured Snippets on February 18, 79% of those same keywords still had Featured Snippets on March 12. So, we're down 21% already. If we narrow the focus to keywords that retained their Featured Snippets and displayed the same page/URL in those Featured, we're down to 60% of the original set.

That seems like a big drop, but we also have to consider that three weeks (22 days, to be precise) passed between the drop and recovery. How much change is normal for three weeks? For comparison's sake, let's look at the Featured Snippet stability for the 22 days prior to the drop:

While these numbers are a bit better than the post-recovery numbers, we're still seeing about three out of 10 keywords either losing a Featured Snippet or changing the Featured Snippet URL. Keep in mind that Featured Snippets are pulled directly from page-one organic results, so they're constantly in flux as the algorithm and the content of the web evolve.

Are Featured Snippets staying home?

It's impossible to say whether the original drop was deliberate on Google's part, an unintentional consequence of another (deliberate) change, or entirely a bug. Honestly, given the focus of the drop on so-called "head" queries and YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) queries, I thought this was a deliberate change that was here to stay. Without knowing why so many Featured Snippets went away, I can't tell you why they came back, and I can't tell you how long to expect them to stay around.

What we can assume is that Google will continue to evaluate Featured Snippet quality, especially for queries where result quality is critical (including YMYL queries) or where Google displays Knowledge Panels and other curated information. Nothing is guaranteed, and no tactic is future-proof. We can only continue to measure and adapt.


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Identify and Refresh Outdated Content

When someone regularly adds new content to their sites, they face an inevitable question: What happens to my older articles? The way blogging works is really unfair to your past work: It gets buried in archives, losing traffic and relevance. Is there a way to keep your content always up-to-date? Yes, but first let’s discuss the why. Why update your content? Keeping your content fresh and updated is more than overcoming the unfairness of your past work fading away. It's actually a legit marketing tactic that saves money and makes your users’ on-site experience smoother. So let’s dive into why updating old content is so important: 1. User experience The most obvious reason is that you want each of your site pages to be an effective entry landing page: Outdated content and broken links will likely result in bounces. These are lost leads and clients. 2. Search engine optimization When it comes to SEO, content updates offer quite a few advantages: Maintaining more consisten...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Create a Useful and Well-Optimized FAQ Page

Posted by AnnSmarty The golden rule of marketing has always been: Don’t leave your customer wondering, or you’ll lose them. This rule also applies very well to SEO: Unless Google can find an answer — and quickly — they’ll pick and feature your competitor. One way to make sure that doesn’t happen is having a well set-up, well-optimized FAQ page. Your FAQ is the key to providing your customers and search engines with all the answers they might need about your brand. Why create an FAQ page? Decrease your customer support team’s workload. If you do it right, your FAQ page will be the first point of contact for your potential customers — before they need to contact you directly. Shorten your customers’ buying journeys. If your site users can find all the answers without having to hear back from your team, they’ll buy right away. Build trust signals. Covering your return policies, shipping processes, and being transparent with your site users will encourage them to put more trust into...
Post a Comment
Read more

Where Can You Go to Learn Local SEO?

Image credit: Fattoria la Maliosa In 2023, I’ll have been studying local SEO for 20 years, and I definitely still won’t know it all. If you’re just entering this fine and spacious field of local search marketing, welcome to what will be a habit of lifelong scholarship. In the next 20 years, you’ll see as many (or more) changes than we’ve witnessed in the nascent decades of this discipline. You’ll study how to lay a feast of options before the local businesses you market, regularly setting out new dishes as new promotional opportunities arise. Your education is what will keep this buffet fresh and hot while keeping you enthusiastic about your work. Here’s the view from my side of the table of what’s happened culturally over the past two decades in the industry: we started out from a real place – marketing quite actual local businesses – and have come to prize their qualities of realness more with each passing year as we’ve learned to prioritize owner expertise, their earned authori...
Post a Comment
Read more