🔍 A "huge update": What the SERP monitoring tools are seeing

Jan 21, 2020

Good morning search marketers, January came in with a bang.

The early impact results from Google's January core algorithm update are in. We reached out to several of the third-party tracking solutions to learn what they're seeing. The consensus is that it was a big one.

RankRanger's Mordy Oberstein says this was a "huge update" with significant movement in YMYL niches of Health and Finance, in particular. Johannes Beus from Sistrix says domains that were affected by previous core updates "are more likely to be affected again," with YMYL-related sites gaining or losing "as a whole." Meanwhile, SEMRush is seeing wide-spread effects across all categories. The most volatile categories, according to its data, were Online communities, Games, Arts & Entertainments, Finance, Sports and News.

Verizon Media is out with a new privacy-centric search engine. Like DuckDuckGo, Verizon Media's OneSearch engine, serves contextual advertising and doesn't use cookies for behavioral targeting or retargeting. No surprise, given the existing Microsoft-Verizon Media partnership, OneSearch results are powered by Bing and ads are served by Microsoft Advertising. We're not seeing much in the way of ads yet, though. Whether this is more vanity project than something Verizon Media will invest in to generate adoption remains to be seen.

With Google's favicon-heavy redesign now rolled out on desktop, contributor Richard Falconer was curious to see how users are responding. Keep reading to see what he learned.

George Nguyen,
Associate Editor

Pro Tip

Google's desktop favicons appear to create more confusion for users

"In 2019, Google introduced a new format in mobile search results which included a small 'favicon' icon from the website, to the left of the snippet. This week, Google announced that a similar format was being launched in desktop results so my agency conducted a study to identify the effect of the changes," explains Richard Falconer of the agency Yard. "We asked a set of 250 users to look at 12 images of desktop search results and compared to results of the old format (without favicons) for the same search queries."

"The number of people who identify ads on Google search results was alarmingly low with the old format. The new format doesn't seem to have changed that percentage significantly but has made identification of the actual ads less accurate. In other words, people think more things are ads when they are not and may identify real ads less often."

Read the case study »

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Search Shorts

Structured data, spam reports and snippet bugs.

Structured data and ranking. Google once again said structured data does not impact your ranking in web search.

Spam reports. Danny Sullivan from Google said spam reports can lead to broad action against spam.

Snippet URL bug. Google had a bug with the URL shown in the search result snippets for many sites. They were working on fixing this bug.

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