Image: Sincerely Media on Unsplash
Google announced last month that it was dropping the continuous scroll feature in Search results.
It has already started turning off continuous scroll for desktop, and will do so for mobile in the coming months.
Search Engine Land reported the move, saying they were told by a Google spokesperson that the change was designed “to serve the search results faster on more searches, instead of automatically loading results that users haven’t explicitly requested”. The spokesperson also said loading more results automatically hadn’t led to significantly higher satisfaction with Search.
For desktop Google will revert to the pagination option in the footer used previously, where users click through to further numbered pages.
On mobile, users will see a “More results” button to load the next page of results.
Continuous scroll was launched for mobile search results in October 2021, and for desktop in December 2022, so has been a short-lived experience.
Continuous scroll mimics the way social media serves content. People are more likely to carry on scrolling than to click through to another page of results - it’s a seamless action rather than a new action being required.
A recent study by FirstPageSage on clickthrough rates (CTR) by ranking position showed that the top 3 organic search results received more than two-thirds (68.7%) of all clicks on the Google Search page.
While the return of paginated search results won’t affect rankings, website owners will again have to give greater consideration to being on page one of the results to maintain visibility and CTR.
