Favicon Not Updating in Google Search Results

3 Comments

1. Google builds snippets differently. Even if you ask googlebot to re-crawl your website, still it will take time to refresh the cache. Generally, it may take 1-4 weeks to refresh their favicon cache as they don’t re-crawl often. Make sure you have removed the old favicon file from your server. Not just the meta tag in head of the HTML. Also, if you are using cloudflare or caching of images, make sure those have set to no-cache, or cache for 1 day by modifying the lines in your .htaccess files. This will help to refresh the cache google has.

2. The higher authority and more visitors your website has the quickly google is going to refresh their cache and outdated favicon. For my site which publishes news articles daily I had seen that google refreshing our favicon with new one within 5 days. So for your website been new, it will take time show new favicon to users in google search results. You can try submitting the image URL in GSC. It helps to ask the googlebot to atleast get to know your new file.

4. Here are some useful steps you can undertake to let your favicon get shown in google quickly: 

   • Clear the cache then restart Chrome.
   • Force the update by deleting the Favicons file in your User Data folder.
   • Hover over the tab, right-click, select reload.
   • Create a redirect and clear your site cache.
   • Check if the favicon meets Google’s favicon guidelines.
   • Check if the favicon image file is in the correct location.
   • Check if your platform or CMS is causing problems.