Late last week (Feb 28 - Mar 1), we saw a sizable two-day spike in Google rankings flux, as measured by MozCast[1]. Temperatures on Friday reached 108°F. The original temperature on Thursday was 105°F, but that was corrected down to 99°F (more on that later).
Digging in on Friday (March 1st), we saw a number of metrics shift, but most notably was a spike in page-one Google SERPs with more than 10 organic results. Across the 10,000 keywords in MozCast, here's what we observed at the high end:
Counting "organic" results in 2019 is challenging — some elements, like expanded site-links (in the #1 position), Top Stories, and image results can occupy an organic position. In-depth Articles are particularly challenging (more on that in a moment), and the resulting math usually leaves us with page-one SERPs with counts from 4 to 12. Friday's numbers were completely beyond anything we've seen historically, though, with organic counts up to 19 results.
Dissecting the 19-result SERP
Across 10K keywords, we saw 9 SERPs with 19 results. Below is one of the most straightforward (in terms of counting). There was a Featured Snippet in the #0 position, followed by 19 results that appear organic. This is a direct screenshot from a result for "pumpkin pie recipe" on Google.com/US:
Pardon the long scroll, but I wanted you to get the full effect. There's no clear marker here to suggest that part of this SERP is a non-organic feature or in some way different. You'll notice, though, that we transition from more traditional recipe results (with thumbnails) to what appear to be a mix of magazine and newspaper articles. We've seen something like this before ...