This is not new (Part 2)

[kexej28769@nongnue]

Over the past two years, I’ve talked a lot about how SERPs have grown beyond 10 blue links. What we talk about less is the flip side, that SERPs are also shrinking. Adding SERP features, in some cases, at the expense of organic results, is a zero-sum game.

Each of the following characteristics occupies an organic position:

Of the 10,000 SERPs in our data set, more bahamas number data half (51%) had fewer than 10 traditional organic results. While very low counts are rare, more than a quarter of page one SERPs fall in the range of 5–8 organic results.



While the zero result SERP is certainly a new and extreme case, the removal of organic results in favor of other features has been happening (and spreading) for quite some time. SERPs with at least 3–4 organic results on page one have been appearing in the wild for over a year.

In some cases, you may not even realize that the result is not organic. For example, consider the following set of results on desktop. Can you see the articles in depth?



On desktop results, there are no visual markers separating in-depth articles from organic results, even though these results are powered by two different aspects of the algorithm. From the source code markers, we can see that the answer is #2–#5, three results that replace one organic result: