Final week, stories claimed Google was testing cellular search outcomes with out favicons or colours, eliminating any benefit conferred by a nicely optimized favicon. Nevertheless, a Google consultant confirmed this was not a check.
Favicons In Search Outcomes
The phrase favicon is brief for “favourite icons,” a picture meant to be proven in browser tabs, in bookmarks and in Google search outcomes. Google lately really useful that publishers use favicons which can be at the least 32×32 pixels in dimension.
Google exhibits favicons in search outcomes, which makes it a refined approach for ranked web sites to draw consideration and visitors. For that cause it might be a blow for a lot of web sites ought to Google take away the favicons as a result of it might additional erode search visibility.
Favicons Lacking?
Lily Ray tweeted a screenshot displaying that the favicons had been lacking in search outcomes.
Google testing natural outcomes with NO favicons or colours. 👎🏽 pic.twitter.com/zhcdnQ04bv
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) November 8, 2024
The screenshot clearly exhibits that the favicons are lacking from the search outcomes. Nevertheless the rationale for that taking place turned out to be one thing else completely.
Googler Rajan Patel, VP of Engineering at Google, tweeted a response that defined that this was not the way in which the search outcomes must be displaying. He defined that this sort of search result’s meant for low finish units that may’t help wealthy outcomes.
He tweeted:
This isn’t supposed. @lilyraynyc Did you have got JavaScript disabled on the system? What sort of system was it? The expertise you’re displaying is what we present for decrease finish units that may’t help the richness of the search outcome web page.”
Lily Ray responded:
“JS is just not disabled. iPhone iOS 18.1 on an iPhone 15 professional. I used to be both utilizing the Chrome app or Google app to go looking, can’t bear in mind which.”
Rajan Patel speculated that it might have been a misconfigured experiment.
Glitches At Google
It seems to be an instance of Google glitching. One thing that wasn’t explored is the whether or not the Web connection or latency could have performed a task in inflicting Google to react to the SERP request as if it was being constituted of a low high quality system. In any case, it’s an instance of how advanced serving search outcomes could be.
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