Google featured snippets, a complete guide for the SEO

Let’s talk about Google featured snippets again! The topic continues to be at the center of SEO strategies and for several years now, professionals share the best practices used to earn these areas paragraph, list or table results. The latest system developments have affected the selected content and the way fragments appear in search results, so an updated guide to Google’s featured snippets is needed.

A reasoned guide on featured snippets

Leading us toward the optimization of targeting work for featured snippets is an article published on the Search Engine Journal by Lily Ray, Path Interactive Director of SEO, that traces back the recent changes made by Google and offers ideas for the optimization of site contents.

Starting with the data: 24 percent of search results shows a snippet in the foreground, while moving to mobile about 80 percent of the search engine’s voice search results come from featured fragments, and so if it is not our site to emerge, it is going to be the one of a competitor.

Recent developments on featured snippets

To the list of the news of this system must also be added the impact of Google BERT, the neural network technology that can process the natural language launched at the end of last year. BERT allows Google to better understand complex queries, improving the understanding of the text and thus also modifying the answers provided through the contents of the snippet in evidence.

Among the various forms of featured snippets have a prevalent role the bubble refinements or carousels, that debuted back in 2018 and that are displayed in about 9 percent of the queries that produce a result with snippets in evidence. This type offers users the possibility to refine their search based on a series of modifiers commonly searched in association with their original query: they are often names, locations or attributes of competing brand products and allow various Urls to simultaneously own the featured snippet.

A relatively new development is that of the snippets displayed in the right sidebar of the results of the search by desktop, that has a similar appearance to the knowledge panels. However, as part of the deduplication of January 2020, Google announced that it would soon move these snippets from the right sidebar into the main search results panel.

Considerations on the value of featured snippets for the SEO

Since last January the sites with featured snippet no longer have the blue link on the first page of the query SERP: for some search marketers this update has questioned the value of the functionality. Namely, is it more strategic to gain the position zero or try to reach the mythical position number 1 of organic results?

The answer really depends on various factors – as the query, intent and content typologies present in the snippet – because these determine if the featured snippet can produce a zero clicks result or the percentage of clicks could be significantly higher than the normal blue links.

So, the thesis of Lily Ray is, “not being able to place us in both positions (snippet and classic SERP) could result in potential drops in traffic“, but the final decision on choosing as the target of the SEO work the snippets in evidence, too, should be taken on a case-to-case basis, evaluating the placement of the keywords, the CTR, the clicks, the impression and the conversion data.

How to block featured snippets on Google

If the analysis of these factors makes us understand that it is more convenient to abandon the featured snippet, we can use three ways to block the functionality and prevent Google from taking and showing our content:

• Add the nosnippet meta tag to the page to prevent all page contents from appearing in both foreground snippets and traditional preview snippets (meta description).
• Use the data-nosnippet tag in line with the span, div or HTML sect