Importance of Favicon for SEO

A favicon is an icon that visually represents a website or brand. These are the small images (set to 16×6 pixels by default) that appear in Google’s mobile search results alongside page titles and in areas such as browser tabs, bookmarks and history information. Ideally, a website’s favicon should be the same as the logo of the company that owns that website.

Here is how Mobitek’s favicon appears in the Google Chrome browser tab when you visit the site:

Here is the Mobitek favicon in Google Chrome’s bookmarks:

And this is the favicon in Google Chrome’s browser history:

If a page does not have a favicon listed in the source code, the browser will show a generic icon like the one below:

Some companies that create web applications, such as Google, use a different favicon for each application or web service. Here is a browser with Google Drive, Google Maps and Google Search Console open:

Favicons are added to a field in the section by adding the following line of code:

The URL listed in the link is the path to the image file.

For Favicons it is recommended to use the .ico format, which is the file format specifically used to save icons, but all major browsers also support PNG and (static-motionless) GIF files.

A Short History of Favicons

This name was originally used by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, now known as Edge. The word “favicon” is a combination of “favorite” and “icon”. The name makes sense, since its original purpose was to be displayed next to URLs in the browser’s favorites bar.

This file first appeared in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5 released in March 1999, and in December 1999 the favicon was standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) with the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) recommendation.

Favicons and Their Impact on SEO

Favicons has no direct impact on search engine optimization or the ranking of a page in search results. However, when Google shows a page in mobile search results, it also displays the favicon of that website:

Pages that do not have a favicon or use an image that violates Google’s favicon rules will have a default icon next to the URL instead of the specified icon.

Thanks to this change by Google, branding has become more important than ever in the SEO world.

People who do SEO work are aware of how important it is to add a favicon to your site and always recommend it to their clients, because when Google crawls a page, it automatically tries to access the URL https://www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico. So if you don’t have a favicon, Google will get a 404 error just like the pages on your website.

However, Google has not explained what role favicons play in ranking. Also, Google is usually smart enough to realize that a non-existent favicon URL that returns a 404 is not indicative of an unhealthy website.

Favicons Beyond SEO Value

In 2015, the Nielsen Norman Group (a UX consulting group) published a study examining users’ behavior when buying clothes online.

What they found is that customers follow this basic process:

Opens a handful of tabs for products they are considering buying
Evaluates their options
They remove products they don’t want to buy by closing the browser tabs of those pages.
Repeats the process, opening a new group of tabs with a new set of products to consider.

Most of your visitors are constantly on the move. That’s why your site’s favicon is more than just a little icon in a browser – it’s an important tool for keeping your brand in the eyes of your customers as they shop for your products.

Adding a favicon to your site brings the following advantages:

Brand awareness: Favicons lets a user know the brand identity of your business, even if you are not on your site.

Credibility: Adding a favicon to your site will make your business look more professional, more trustworthy.

So, while a website’s favicon may seem like a not-so-important part of the website, it really deserves attention. A well-designed favicon can make your site’s marketing more effective in more subtle but important ways.