Changes to Featured Snippets and the SERPs impact sites

Google Changes Featured Snippets and the SERPS

January 24, 2020

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We have all seen the rise of Featured Snippets, Rich Snippets, Rich Results in the SERPs and the impact it has on our sites. I wrote a post about dominating the SERPs at the end of last year going through some of the changes we have seen. Google are certainly keeping us on our toes and Google said on Wednesday this week that they will only be featuring one featured snippet going forward. This affects all sites globally. There have already been a lot of questions asked to Danny Sullivan at Google who announced it.

If a web page listing is elevated into the featured snippet position, we no longer repeat the listing in the search results. This declutters the results & helps users locate relevant information more easily. Featured snippets count as one of the ten web page listings we show.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) January 22, 2020

So what does that mean for us? Before getting into the detail let us review some of these featured snippets and direct answers.

What are Direct Answers?

A direct answer is as the name suggests, providing a direct answer to the user’s query and it appears at the top of the search results below the paid ads. Google returns this direct answer when it thinks that a website’s content is answering the user’s search query. The direct answer is also called the “answer box” or “position 0” and “featured snippet”.

Many companies want to rank for this position 0 since Google launched it in 2015. Ranking in the answer box also affects voice search. According to a study by Roast, 80% of the Google Home results are from snippets. There are three different types of these answer boxes: paragraph answers, list answers, and table answers.

What is position 0?

As of January 24th, we do not know if ‘Position 0’ will continue to exist due to the changes announced January 22nd by Danny Sullivan.

Any featured snippet originally comes from having been ranked on the first page of results. Then we dedupe. So it IS in the search results. And if it's not longer a featured snippet but still relevant for the search, it remains a web result.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) January 23, 2020

Google, as we know, are always changing the goalposts. The first “position 0” was launched in 2013 and was called the answer box. They gave a simple answer to the user’s query, for example, currency rates. As this was also called position 0, there were still 10 other organic positions in the SERPs. Then in 2015 they became “quick answers” and had more information in them. Ann Smarty goes into a lot of detail on Search Engine People. And now we think there will no longer by position 0, but instead just 10 SERPs displayed.

What are featured snippets?

Featured snippets like direct answers and position 0 are when Google takes content from a website and presents it as an answer to a user’s search query referencing the original website as a source.

Google determines whether your content answers specific user questions, or not, and if it does it will show your featured snippet. There are some guidelines on how to appear for one of the numerous featured snippets such as FAQ, How To, and Q and A. However, at the same time, Google says you cannot control how to get into some types of “featured snippet”, such appearing in People Also Ask (PAA) or as paragraph featured snippet as I go into detail in the experiment below:

What Google does say is that you need to make your content answer the user's intent. I decided to try and get our site into a “featured snippet”. We were updating some of the content on our key features including the keyword ranking API page. As you can see before we changed the content, we were not appearing for 'Keyword Ranking API' as a paragraph featured snippet before.

Google keyword ranking API query (Before)

I then amended the content and now Authoritas has a featured snippet for “Keyword ranking API”. I just checked it again today and it is still there. This is the first Universal Ranking result although you may be mistaken due to the PPC adverts looking like organic listings, sneaky Google.

Google keyword ranking API query (After)

I also checked for “what is a SERPs API” and Authoritas also features, but it answers the question immediately. It removes the question “What is a SERPs API?”

Perhaps with this change on what “featured snippets” are shown in the SERPs from this week, we may see more “featured snippets” appear. I will be looking at this example next week as the change has been rolled out globally.

What is the difference between a “rich snippet” and a “featured snippet”?

A “Rich Snippet” or “Rich Result” is an enhanced featured snippet and it comes from the information in the structured data on a website. Google first introduced rich snippets back in 2009 and looked for markup formats which were microformats and RDFa that users added to their sites. Sites implement structured data through using the schema markup. You can find more information on the Schema site: https://schema.org/

There are constant developments to Rich Snippets and In 2017, Google introduced a testing tool so users can see if their rich snippets are working. They also called these “rich results”.

Google will show these rich snippets if you have put structured data on your website either via a plugin or hand-coded.

There are many different types of rich snippets including:

Example of a rich snippet:

How does this all tie in with universal search? And the traditional “organic” result?

Back in May 2007, nine years after Google launched, Danny Sullivan announced that Google would be introducing "universal search", first rolling out in Google.com. It would be delivering blended listings from news, videos, images, and local results. Bill Slawski goes into the history in more detail within this post, explaining that Universal Search started back in 2001, way before the announcement. Organic results have changed over the past two decades but they remain the overall natural positions of terms and sites within Google, they are not paid for. Moz explains the different elements of the SERPs on their blog.

OK so what about SERPs features, where do they fit in?

These are any results that appear in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) which include the rich snippets, universal results, paid, and knowledge graph. SERP features are not the traditional organic results we saw when Google first launched.

Within the Authoritas platform and our SERPs (Keyword Ranking) API, we can track the following SERP features:

As you can see, I’ve included alternative names for a few of these features as they have been changed by Google over the years or referred to by SEOs as different things.

We also track whether the SERP feature is visible on page load and whether it is displayed above the fold on mobile and desktop devices.

There are many different aspects of SERPs that users can help to appear for by ensuring their content is optimized.

A word of advice on the implications for your rank tracking software and APIs from this latest Google update:

If you have just been tracking organic positions and not universal rank positions – then you are likely to see a big drop in organic rankings where you rank for a Featured Snippet (FS). Given all the changes we are seeing (and the ones that will inevitably follow) you need to be using keyword rank tracking software that:

What is the impact of these changes on our traffic?

Before this update in the week, everyone was asking “how can I rank for position 0?” We may see position 0 turn to position 1. Therefore if this remains true, sites can increase their chance by creating the content to directly answer a user’s question. However, now what we have to do is decide which page you want to have rank for featured snippets. Before you could choose to have FAQ and have another page rank, but this is no longer the case.

We do not know yet what impact this will have, each site may be different, so monitor your organic traffic and your impressions and clicks in Google Search Console. If you do decide to make changes, do this to just a few pages of your website. Google also allows you to opt out of Featured Snippets which means it will stop Google from displaying the content on that page as a Featured Snippet.

If you do not have featured snippets or this is something you were going to implement this week, then it is even more important than ever to do research in the market first to see if there is already a direct answer for the question.

You should also inform your client about this update and explain that only one Featured Snippet can rank on page 1 and you need to track the performance even more closely going forwards over the next few days.