Google has changed its Search Central documentation, specifically focusing on favicons. This update provides updated guidelines and best practices for website developers and designers on how to create and implement favicons effectively. This update aims to help web admins ensure their favicons meet Google’s latest standards for optimal visibility and user experience in search results.

Favicon

A favicon serves as a small but significant visual representation of a website. When designed effectively, it can stand out on search engine results pages (SERPs), attracting more attention and increasing the chance of users clicking through to the site. The favicon is associated with a webpage using the HTML “rel” attribute, which indicates the relationship between a linked resource (in this case, the favicon) and the webpage itself. The term “rel” stands for “relation.”

Revision of Documentation

Google recently updated its support page for favicon types, particularly in the section discussing recommended favicon types. The revised section offers more explicit guidance on which favicon attributes are considered standard and which are legacy, providing more comprehensive information for developers.

What’s Changed?

The following section was removed due to its ambiguous and overly technical language:

Set the rel attribute to one of the following strings:

• icon
• apple-touch-icon
• apple-touch-icon-precomposed
• shortcut icon

Using “strings” to describe text was deemed needlessly jargon-heavy, and the instructions needed to be more straightforward.

The revised section now reads:

Google supports these rel attribute values for specifying a favicon; choose the one that best suits your needs:

• icon: Represents your site standardly, as defined in HTML.
• apple-touch-icon: An icon designed for iOS, according to Apple’s developer documentation.
• apple-touch-icon-precomposed: An older icon variant for earlier versions of iOS, also referenced in Apple’s developer documentation.

In addition to this updated list, Google has added a callout box with this clarification:

“For historical reasons, we support shortcut icon, an older alternative to icon.”

The term “shortcut icon” refers to a legacy approach to specifying a favicon, where developers used rel=”shortcut icon” instead of rel=”icon”. Google’s updated documentation confirms that they still support this non-standard method to maintain backward compatibility, even though it’s outdated.

If you still need help finding it, check out our monthly SEO packages and let our experts guide you.