Favi-gone: 7 Reasons Why Your Favicon Disappeared From The Google Search Results [Case Studies] (2024)

They say “a favicon is worth a thousand words”. OK… they really don’t say that, but favicons can definitely be important from a Search perspective. In 2019, Google started displaying favicons and site names in the mobile search results as part of a mobile redesign. And after heavy testing in 2022 and early 2023, Google finally rolled out favicons and site names in the desktop search results on March 8, 2023. Note, if you are looking for site name help, then check out my post about troubleshooting site names issues in the SERPs. This post is about favicons.

It ends up that those little graphics in the SERPs can sure help on several levels. For example, a favicon can help reinforce your brand, it can attract eyeballs in a crowded SERP, and it can also help with click-through rate. So you definitely want to make sure your favicon game is strong.

Favicon Assistance: When site owners reach out about favicon problems.
Every now and then I have site owners reaching out in frustration when their favicons go missing from the search results. When that happens, it can be a very confusing situation for those site owners… Well, I recently just helped a few more site owners over the past several weeks troubleshoot favicon and site name problems in the search results. And based on what I found, I figured I would write a post explaining some of the top reasons I’ve seen that cause favicon problems in Google Search.

The problems are relatively easy to fix and changes can be picked up by Google pretty quickly for most sites. For example, one of the latest fixes I helped with was picked up in just a few hours and the SERPs were updated in less than a day (with the new favicon).

Favicons Disappearing and Questions About Quality:
When favicons go missing, some site owner immediately jump to thinking that Google somehow doesn’t trust their site anymore or that there are quality problems causing Google to stop displaying their favicons (like how rich snippets can be impacted by broad core updates). That’s not the case. Favicons going missing in the SERPs have nothing to do with site quality. Instead, it has everything to do with technical problems with the favicons, or violating Google’s guidelines for providing favicons.

So if your favicon goes missing, it’s not that Google has suddenly reevaluated your site quality-wise. It’s probably due to technical issues or other guideline violations (which I’ll cover below).

2. Robots.txt blocking the favicon:
Google’s documentation states that you should allow crawling of your favicon and your homepage in order for the favicon to be used in Search. If your homepage is blocked by robots.txt, you clearly have bigger issues to worry about than just the favicon. :) But the favicon location could cause problems and be confusing from a robots.txt perspective. For example, some directives in robots.txt can be “greedy” and block more than you think.

I recommend using the robots.txt Tester in Google Search Console to make sure your favicon and homepage can be crawled. It’s a quick test and can save you some frustration. For example, here is a site with a missing favicon and it’s blocking access to the favicon. It’s a bigger brand by the way, so yes, larger companies can make this mistake too.

And here’s an interesting side note. Google has a specific crawler for favicons called Google Favicon. You can check the Googlebot documentation for the user-agent string. Google will use this crawler to check your favicon when you request indexing of your homepage via Google Search Console (GSC). And the crawler will ignore robots.txt directives when someone requests a recrawl of the homepage based on a favicon change.

For example, this is directly from the favicon documentation:
“TheGoogle Faviconcrawler ignores robots.txt rules when the crawl was requested by a user.”And here is the crawler user-agent:

3. Duplicate favicon references and one didn’t meet Google’s favicon guidelines:
This is similar to the first issue I covered, but it includes duplicate favicon references in the homepage code (and one didn’t meet the guidelines). I’ve seen situations where one, or more, of the favicon references are to files that don’t meet the requirements and Google just displayed the generic globe favicon instead in the SERPs. So just make sure to double-check all of the references to your favicon from your homepage and make sure they are ok.

For example, this site’s favicon wasn’t showing up correctly. It ended up the homepage had multiple rel=“icon” references and one didn’t meet Google’s guidelines. Fixing that by just having one rel=”icon” reference pointing at the proper file enabled the site to regain its favicon in the SERPs:

4. Location of the favicon image file:
Update: February 24, 2023: I reached out to Google after seeing favicons show up in the search results even when the favicon file was hosted on another domain. That’s not supposed to work, so I was interested in hearing from Google about that. I ended up hearing back from Google after they looked into it, and you do NOT have to host the favicon file on the same domain as the homepage. This is great to know, and it’s one less thing to worry about if your favicon isn’t showing up in the search results.

Here is what the documentation used to say:

6. Your platform or CMS is botched favicon-wise.
For sites that use a specific platform or CMS to run their site, they may be in a situation where they can’t easily set or customize their favicon. And in situations where you don’t have much control, you are relying solely on the platform or CMS to get it right. And as you can guess, that doesn’t always work out well.

And yes, that means all sites using that platform could have favicon problems. I surfaced this problem recently for a smaller e-commerce platform. Google just isn’t replacing the favicon with the generic globe, it’s literally leaving the favicon blank! This is even worse than receiving the generic favicon in my opinion…

7. Your old default favicon is causing problems (WordPress theme or CMS favicon):
There are times where an older favicon file is showing up in the SERPs versus the new one you want Google to use. Or the default favicon.ico file is being used (based on your WordPress theme or CMS). For situations like that, there are a few things you can do to help get the right favicon showing up. Actually, Google’s John Mueller covered that in the May Search Central Office Hours video.

John explained that you should remove the old favicon completely from your site and make sure it’s not linked from the site. And if you can, redirect the old favicon file to the new one you created. And as I’ve explained throughout this document, be patient. It can take some time for Google to pick up and process your favicon changes.

Here is the segment from John about favicons (at 13:31 in the video):

Bonus 1: Don’t push the limits with your favicon.
In its documentation, Google has explained that it won’t show any favicon that it deems inappropriate (like p*rnography or hate symbols). If that’s the case, Google will simply provide the default, generic favicon. Just keep this in mind when crafting a favicon… I’m sure this won’t impact most sites, but it can clearly cause issues with your favicon displaying properly in the SERPs.

Here is what Google explains in their favicon documentation:

Bonus 2: Create an adaptive favicon that works well in dark mode.
People love dark mode and that includes Google Search. But I find many don’t test how their favicon displays in dark mode.

Once you check out your favicon in dark mode, and if you think it looks less-than-optimal, then you can always create an adaptive favicon that looks great in both light and dark mode. For example, creating an SVG that uses media queries to ensure your favicon adapts to the current environment (light mode versus dark mode).

Adam Argyle wrote a post explaining how to create an adaptive favicon on web.dev where he walks you through the process of creating an SVG that can change based on light versus dark mode. I haven’t tested it out yet, but it’s an interesting technique that seems to work well in the demo. I might try doing that in the near future.

Summary: Put your best favicon, I mean foot, forward in Search with one that actually shows up.
I hope this post helped you understand some of the most common favicon problems I’ve seen while helping site owners that reached out to me for help. With favicons and site names being displayed prominently in both the mobile and desktop search results, you don’t want a less-than-optimal favicon staring users in the face. And you also don’t want the “meh” generic favicon that Google can provide, or worse, a blank favicon. A few minutes of digging into the situation can usually surface the core favicon problem. And once fixed, you can finally have a favicon that works for you instead of against you. Good luck.

GG

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