Google have a new SERP layout coming that they announced 2 days ago...

Following the success and extra ad clicks on the new mobile SERP layout, they have decided to bring favicons to desktop search also!

Last year, our search results on mobile gained a new look. That’s now rolling out to desktop results this week, presenting site domain names and brand icons prominently, along with a bolded “Ad” label for ads. Here’s a mockup: pic.twitter.com/aM9UAbSKtv

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) January 13, 2020

You have to be a bit retarded to be confused by this... It's obviously an effort to trick users into clicking on ads more and therefore increasing ad revenue.

The increase in SERP features and Ads is getting a bit ridiculous, as this tweet shows...

Hey boss I think you left out a few ads. Imagine being a normal user looking at this... highly doubt they even realize they’re looking ads. Though I guess that’s the point. https://t.co/Kovxi7ECcS pic.twitter.com/XHnXRvMwB7

— SEOwner (@tehseowner) January 14, 2020

Multiple scrolls to get to an organic result, what a great improvement!...

So we can either bitch and moan about that shit or we can think about exploiting this, after all it's just another oportunity to boost CTR right?

Here are some rough ideas that may or may not work, not all have been tested...

But first, what is a favicon?

They are the small square images that most websites use that are displayed on browser tabs like this:

Some people think they are important for branding and trust, I kind of agree but this new layout is too much of an opportunity to take advantage so fuck your brand.

Most people are going to find their favicon code in their header, it looks something like this:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href='favicon.png' />

If you're using a CMS like wordpress it should be an option in your theme settings.

Violent Hate Speech

Google don't seem to have much of a filter on what they are allowing to be displayed through the SERPs, for example the based American nazi party have no issues getting their swastika to show up...

So if you were trying to make your website stick out a bit in a niche, what could you put that would actually catch someones eye like this hate symbol?...

If you're selling pool accessories, why not a man facedown drowning or a pool of blood... Why not just a bright red square? 10-15 favicons of pools will be boring to users, stand out a little bit...

Just ask people to fucking click

You can have this one for free...

This is almost certain to increase CTR compared to gay clip art that no one ever put thought into (99.9999% of favicons).

This is 512x512, just use it.

Animated Favicons

I suspect this won't work on Googles SERPs but we don't know until it rolls out... It's entirely possible they forgot to test this and let it slide for a week or so while they patch it later.

How to make animated favicons!

So you may think this is some 1995 shit, it is... But it's not quite as simple as you think. An animated gif won't play natively in the tab section on our browser so we need to create a javascript snippet that basically changes the images one ater another to give it the appearance that it's animated.

We can do this with this code that I stole from useful angle:

var favicon_images = [
                    'http://website.com/img/tmp-0.gif',
                    'http://website.com/img/tmp-1.gif',
                    'http://website.com/img/tmp-2.gif',
                    'http://website.com/img/tmp-3.gif',
                    'http://website.com/img/tmp-4.gif',
                    'http://website.com/img/tmp-5.gif',
                    'http://website.com/img/tmp-6.gif'
                ],
    image_counter = 0; // To keep track of the current image

setInterval(function() {
    $("link[rel='icon']").remove();
    $("link[rel='shortcut icon']").remove();
    $("head").append('<link rel="icon" href="' + favicon_images[image_counter] + '" type="image/gif">');
    
	// If last image then goto first image
	// Else go to next image    
	if(image_counter == favicon_images.length -1)
        image_counter = 0;
    else
        image_counter++;
}, 200);

The script is very simple, we need to take our images that we want to animate for our favicon as individual frames and replace the URLs with these images in the array at the start of the snippet.

var favicon_images = [
                    'http://website.com/img/tmp-0.gif',
                    'http://website.com/img/tmp-1.gif',
                    'http://website.com/img/tmp-2.gif',
                    'http://website.com/img/tmp-3.gif',
                    'http://website.com/img/tmp-4.gif',
                    'http://website.com/img/tmp-5.gif',
                    'http://website.com/img/tmp-6.gif'
                ],
    image_counter = 0; // To keep track of the current image

It sounds all scary and hard, it's not. Take your animated gif you want to use and go to this online tool that will turn the gif into separate images for each frame.

Alternatively you could use a library or something like this:

• https://github.com/dlom/favicon.js/tree/master

There are many ways to animate a favicon, this is very much a "if google fuck up" strategy as we have not seen the desktop SERPs yet but they have history of messing up...

It's our fucking duty to fuck this shit up

If Google keep getting away with these changes to lower the number of organic clicks then it quickly takes money out of all our pockets, that's gay.

It's our duty as SEO's to take advantage of every adverse change that Google make just like this. Exploit, spam, break and kill everything they do... Google have tried stuff like this before with authorship and other schema stuff and reversed it when we took the piss. Let's do it again and again until we get the SERPs we want like feral fucking children.

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Hash BrownInternet ActivistEnglandJoined 02 December, 2018Staff

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