SEOs Enjoying Google's Favicon Mobile Search Results Interface

As you know, Google has started rolling out the new interface for the mobile search results that include the favicons at the top of the snippets. Most SEOs feel that this redesign once again makes the ads look more like the organic free results. So SEOs are now having fun with their favicons.

Here are some fun tweets:

Starting to regret our choice of favicon 🤷‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/AOGqwrgwkz

— Paul Madden (@PaulDavidMadden) May 23, 2019

How I made my Google organic search result look like a Google ad. https://t.co/8Qeoe7rnHr pic.twitter.com/bRBx0YLAR9

— Bill Hartzer (@bhartzer) May 26, 2019

To which phishing sites & bad actors are going to have a field day with.

Something already expressed by many to their team obscuring URLs.

Tell me which is the right site?

Bad actor. Get similar favicon to big brand. Add big brand name to title. BOOM! Catch the honey.@Google pic.twitter.com/tOr4QEcpWY

— Kristine Schachinger (@schachin) May 26, 2019

The list goes on and on.

I don't think anyone has gone with the Google Ads favicon:

vs

Of course, as Bill showed, he made his web site's favicon look like the Google Ads icon:

I assume Google will be adding some guidelines to these favicons at some point. Like, you can't set your icon to be a company logo that is not yours. Also, minimum resolution sizes and other parameters. Stuff like that?

Oh and for those CMS platforms or hosting providers that set a default favicon for their sites, Google will probably just show the default. So you should make sure to use a custom one if you can:

We're going to show the favicon provided by a site in most cases, which I think is the correct thing to do.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) May 23, 2019

Anyway - you just got to love the SEO community and their humor, right?

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: Google has posted their favicons guidelines, the guidelines were posted when Google announced this last week.

I'd suggest you switch back ASAP. This wasn't unanticipated. In cases of inappropriate favicons -- and this almost certain will be such -- we can change the site to only get the default favicon https://t.co/wZYUBkW1Aa pic.twitter.com/W0kevj8EFw

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) May 27, 2019

These guidelines include:

• Both the favicon file and the home page must be crawlable by Google (that is, they cannot be blocked to Google).
• Your favicon should be a visual representation of your website's brand, in order to help users quickly identify your site when they scan through search results.
• Your favicon should be a multiple of 48px square, for example: 48x48px, 96x96px, 144x144px and so on. SVG files, of course, do not have a specific size. Any valid favicon format is supported. Google will rescale your image to 16x16px for use in search results, so make sure that it looks good at that resolution. Note: do not provide a 16x16px favicon.
• The favicon URL should be stable (don’t change the URL frequently).
• Google will not show any favicon that it deems inappropriate, including pornography or hate symbols (for example, swastikas). If this type of imagery is discovered within a favicon, Google will replace it with a default icon.

Update: Later in the day, Google started to penalize sites breaking these guidelines by removing their favicons.