Changes in SERP features, especially featuring authoritative sites
Lily Ray has noted that large authoritative sites like the CDC and FDA have had a big surge in visibility since May 16, 2022.
Check out the massive visibility surges among these government sites / medical authorities since May 16.
Also, worth noting their growth in general. pic.twitter.com/VxGVtPC3np
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) May 24, 2022
At first, I wasn’t sure about this as tools like Semrush are not reporting much traffic increase for these sites.
Interesting. I could certainly see this being an update where Google tightened up what was YMYL and gave preference to sites like CDC and FDA.
But overall though, SEMrush is not reporting much significant change overall for the domains. You’d think they’d see huge increases🤔 pic.twitter.com/6BAOgxXQW3
— Dr. Marie Haynes🐧 (@Marie_Haynes) May 25, 2022
However, Lily had an excellent point.
Could be the pesky “Things to Know” panel, which appears to drive “top rankings” but not much traffic. pic.twitter.com/3Tcb0Ewq38
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) May 25, 2022
“Things to Know” is a new SERP feature. Google originally announced this in their SearchOn 2021 presentation saying it would be powered by MUM. As far as we know, this feature is not yet MUM-powered.
We have a feature of that name, but it’s not yet using MUM.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) March 15, 2022
We have heard others say that for many of their SERPs, the People Also Ask accordions were now featured higher up in the search results as well, potentially stealing clicks.
It may be hard to track whether the Things to Know or other Google SERP features are stealing traffic from you as most of the rank tracking tools, as far as I am aware, do not yet track this feature.
I am only able to see “Things to Know” results if I do a mobile search from the US (You can use U Search From to do this).
A few people noted that on May 18, the US saw its first case of Monkeypox. Between this and all of the other tragic things happening in the world right now, it is possible that Google has once again turned up the dial on E-A-T as they describe in their guide to how they fight disinformation. They say, “we have designed our systems to prefer
authority over factors like recency or exact word matches while a crisis is developing.”
(If you want to learn more on this topic, Marie is speaking virtually at SMX Advanced this year on June 14 to explain the specifics of improving E-A-T with knowledge of semantic search. SMX is usually an expensive conference, but because it is virtual this year, they have made it free! You can register here.)
