Estimated read time: 2 minutes
From a consumer perspective this update was hard to miss! Google search results pages on mobile look different now. This change went live at the end of May 2019.
Here’s an example:
The top design element above each result is new.
So the LinkedIn > Christoph Trappe
Other times, it shows the URL of a website. And it always shows the favicon with the listing. That’s new and for brand officers important to note. If you don’t have a favicon on your site, now is the time!
What’s a favicon?
A favicon is the logo or image associated with a website. Often it’s the logo of the company or brand.
In this example above you can see the logo of the conference where I spoke. The second example is Scribble Live’s blog from when I worked for them in the Software as a Service industry. It’s also nice to see that Scribble followed my blog post with tips on bylines for former employees. They rank for my name on page 1 of Google as well!
Going back to the top picture, my site is just showing the Bluehost default favicon since I never uploaded a specific one for my brand. <Leaves to work on that> Bluehost is my host provider for this website.
How to add a favicon to your site
In WordPress it’s super simple. I downloaded the All in one favicon plugin from the repository.
Once downloaded, it shows under SETTINGS in the left sidebar from the dashboard.
I just took a recent photo of myself speaking and uploaded that in the first upload area:
It’s already showing on the site:
And I assume it will show on Google Search Results Pages at some point here.
And how about desktop results?
As of early June 2019, there were no changes to desktop result pages:
That doesn’t mean it won’t change at some point, but for now, desktop remains the same.
Should we make sure to have an updated favicon?
As you can see by my blog, I hadn’t made it a priority to add a favicon and I still didn’t invest to hire my designer for the job. But this is just me, you know. While people read, I pick my battles on when to invest dollars and when not to. Certainly, businesses do that, too.
At the least, for myself I found it important enough to have a favicon other than the Bluehost one. So I just used a picture of a recent talk for now.
Hire your next content marketing, social media and storytelling keynote speaker here
For businesses, I would highly recommended to use a smaller version of your logo just to keep branding the same. If you have a logo that’s being used on Twitter, I bet it will work. I didn’t even have to resize my image. I just uploaded it for example. The same likely will work for your logo.
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