Beauty

Google Shuts Down Infinite and Continuous Scroll Features

In December 2022, Google fully rolled out Continuous and Infinite Scroll for both mobile and Desktop. As we see now google shows a list of websites ranking on 1st page and removes the pagination bar in SERPs. But now google decided to stop this scroll feature and again started showing a pagination bar at footer.

Removing this feature from desktop first: Google already started to stop this feature from desktop and from mobile it will remove this feature in coming months.

What Actually this Continuous and Infinite Scroll Feature is?

Continuous scroll is for desktop, as you can see in the below gif that we are getting multiple results on the 1st page rather than pagination. It means impressions will increase but it will highly affect the clicks and CTR. Earlier, we noticed mostly clicks on the results which are on the first page but now it all depends on the user where to click if the user is getting 90+ results on a single page.

Google scroll feature results

As we analyzed in our website, there is a sudden drop of clicks as well impressions after google started to remove this feature in Desktop. Also, I checked some other websites and its impact was recorded.

On the other hand, Infinite scroll is for mobile devices, that means google shows results like Instagram reels which means user searches a query and he/she is scrolling down without getting any pagination bar.

Google Pagination bar

Why Is Google Discontinuing Infinite Scrolling?

As seen, google already started this on June 26 to shut down this feature. Reason behind this is that users are getting irrelevant and unnecessary search results for their query.

As Search Engine Land states, this automated feature is offering unnecessary results for the users which doesn’t make users satisfied with their results.

What can be the Impact on the Digital Marketing World?

SEO/Organic

It basically affects the ranking. For eg: If one of the keywords is ranking on 11th then without this scroll feature it will show on 2nd page but by scrolling feature it will show on the 1st page because pagination is not present. As I checked “Running shoes” for this keyword 93 results were seen on the 1st page.

But from now Google started to shut down this feature so If your keyword is ranking in 11th place then surely it will show on the 2nd page of google which results in getting less impressions and clicks. That’s the main reason people are facing an impact on their Google Search Console Data.

What can be the solution for this?

Continuous scroll is good for social media like Instagram or Facebook but if I talk about Google then it’s not good enough. Many bloggers and SEO experts stated that they observe a poor user experience. That’s why Google always wants to have a good user experience. And google will now remove the pages which users haven’t asked for.

Rest you all will see the older version of the search results with a paginated bar at footer.

mayank
Author: mayank

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