Final week, stories claimed Google was testing cellular search outcomes with out favicons or colours, eliminating any benefit conferred by a effectively optimized favicon. Nonetheless, a Google consultant confirmed this was not a take a look at.
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 very least 32×32 pixels in measurement.
Google reveals favicons in search outcomes, which makes it a delicate approach for ranked web sites to draw consideration and site visitors. For that cause it will be a blow for a lot of web sites ought to Google take away the favicons as a result of it will 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 reveals that the favicons are lacking from the search outcomes. Nonetheless the explanation for that occuring 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 best way the search outcomes needs to be displaying. He defined that this sort of search result’s meant for low finish gadgets that may’t assist wealthy outcomes.
He tweeted:
This isn’t meant. @lilyraynyc Did you may have JavaScript disabled on the gadget? What sort of gadget was it? The expertise you’re displaying is what we present for decrease finish gadgets that may’t assist the richness of the search consequence web page.”
Lily Ray responded:
“JS just isn’t disabled. iPhone iOS 18.1 on an iPhone 15 professional. I used to be both utilizing the Chrome app or Google app to look, can’t keep in mind which.”
Rajan Patel speculated that it could 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 gadget. In any case, it’s an instance of how complicated serving search outcomes will be.
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