Google revised its documentation on favicons to add definitions in response to user questions received about favicons and what to use. The updated version of the documentation is significantly better because it explains the difference between the legacy favicon form and the newer version.
Favicon
A favicon is a visual representation of a site and, when executed correctly, can draw attention to itself on search engine results pages (SERPs) and encourage more clicks. The favicon is linked with the HTML attribute “rel”, which shows the relationship between a linked resource (the favicon) and the web page itself. REL stands for relationship.
Review of the documentation
Google’s favicon support page revised the section on what types of favicons are recommended and adds more detail explaining which are the legacy versions and which are the modern versions.
Here are the changes
This section was revised and basically removed:
Set the rel attribute to one of the following strings:
icon apple-touch-icon apple-touch-icon precomposed shortcut icon
The problem with the previous section is the use of the word “strings” to mean text, but it is unnecessarily verbose and not informative enough.
This section was replaced by the following:
Google supports the following rel attribute values to specify a favicon; use whatever suits your use case:
icon
The icon that represents your site, as defined in the HTML standard. apple touch icon
An iOS-compatible icon that represents your site, according to Apple’s developer documentation. apple-touch-precomposed-icon
An alternative icon for older versions of iOS, according to Apple’s developer documentation.
There is also a new highlighted text box with the following information:
“For historical reasons, we also support the shortcut icon, which is an older alternative version of the icon.”
A “shortcut icon” is a term that refers to an old way of signaling the presence of a favicon by using rel=”shortcut icon” instead of rel=”icon”, so the documentation from Google indicates that they will still support the non-standard way of linking with a favicon.
The new documentation is improved with more descriptive writing.
Read the new documentation here:
Set a favicon to display in search results
Compare it with the old documentation here:
Internet Archive: Define a favicon to display in search results
Featured image by Shutterstock/GoodStudio
