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Google Makes Major Changes to In-Depth Article Results

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indepth article changesGoogle has made some changes to in-depth articles in the search results which make them appear more like regular organic search results.

Dr. Pete Meyers was the first to notice the change, since it affected Mozcast data for both the regular weather report and the in-depth results, but with the corrected results have some changes.

First, Google has dropped the percentage of results that show in-depth article results by about half.  Mozcast data shows that in-depth results were showing for about 13.2% of all queries they track, but on January 5, 2016 that dropped to just over 7%.

mozcast in depthSecond, Google has also changed their appearance in the search results.  Previously, in-depth results were usually 3 lines in length.

Here is how in-depth results are appearing now.

in depth 2 linesHere is how Google in-depth results prior to the change, with 3 lines for the snippets.

indepth 2015All these in-depth results have the usual 3 lines, making them easily recognizable, even though Google dropped the “In-Depth Articles” header.

Some in-depth results now only have a single line description snippet though.

in depth 2 lines3This change could have been made because Google is showing 3 and 4 lined snippets in their regular Google search results now, and they are trying to keep the length of the pages down, particularly on pages that also have other search features too.

Google has made multiple changes to how Google displays the in-depth articles over the past year.  In April they removed thumbnails from the in-depth results.  They also removed the “In-Depth Articles” header that used to appear at the top of all those results.  So these new changes are bringing it more inline with regular organic search results.

Now, with this change, the only way to tell whether the results are in-depth results or not is by the line breaks Google still uses to separate them from regular results.

If some sites were receiving a lot of traffic from in-depth article results, then it could definitely have a negative impact on CTR.  But I imagine Google did some testing of this and found there wasn’t a huge decline in CTR, or that the clicks switched to other results on the page, meaning it didn’t affect overall search results quality.

This change seems to be for all users worldwide.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post
Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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