13 January 2010 | Author: R. Falconer SEO Consultant

Google expands use of favicons in Webmaster Tools

Google has expanded Webmaster Tools to include favicons alongside site names. Could this be an indication that Google plans to make further use of favicons within search results?

We've previously seen the company testing this in both paid and unpaid search results, which may have wide-reaching implications.

Favicons - short for 'favourites icons' - are small images of 16x16 pixels that are usually visible to the left of the URL in a browser's address bar. Most corporate sites now make use of favicons - for example, if you look at your address bar now, you should see something similar to this for bigmouthmedia pages:





The bigmouthmedia teeth are the favicon.

Last year, Barry Schwartz brought to our attention a post at Google Blogoscoped, in which a user had posted screenshots of Google experimenting with favicons in natural search results. Google later confirmed this experiment and took public feedback on it. So far, favicons have not been widely released in Google results, but it may be only a matter of time before they become commonplace. It is notable that no other major search engine currently uses favicons in search results.

What would our listing look like with a favicon, and what benefits would this bring to the site or to the user?

Our search listing might look something like this mock-up:













The benefits in terms of branding are obvious, and this fits in well with the now-infamous comment made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in which he described the internet as a "cesspool" that could be improved through use of branding. Google further demonstrated its pro-brand stance with last year's Vince update, which promoted big brands in certain searches and demonstrated that Google believes this is what users want too.

The flip-side of this could include brand jacking; if favicons become commonplace in results and users become more reliant on them to navigate to their favourite sites, they could be less likely to check the site's URL. The site then becomes an easy target for an unscrupulous competitor to steal their favicon or to create a very similar one, allowing them to reap the benefits of a strong brand without putting in the work to create their own.

Add to this the fact that the size of favicons is only 16x16 pixels, which means there will be many that look very similar in appearance. This could present issues as favicons become ever more prominent.

Google has also tested the use of favicons in AdWords in the UK, as Dave Naylor pointed out in his inimitable style last March. Again, we have yet to see a full roll-out of this yet either, but it adds to the weight of evidence that we should expect to see something before too long. There was also a suggestion last year that having favicons on your pages could affect AdWords quality scores.

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