The ultimate goal for most websites is to be ranked first in Google’s search results, but since 2013 there has been another position on the first page in the SERPs that is even more sought after. The so-called position 0 has made its way to the first page of the search engine thanks to a feature introduced by Google almost a decade ago called featured snippets.
Feature snippets are short descriptions of a page that appear as the first result in the SERPs after the user browses for a particular search query. They are shortcuts that try to answer the user’s questions before entering a specific site. The content that appears in a featured snippet is automatically extracted from pages indexed by Google and can be anything from the highlighted answers to a question to statistics or lists.
As of 22 January 2020, Google has announced that site listings will no longer be able to appear both as featured snippets and results on the first page. The double representation was previously able to bring a substantial traffic boost for websites, as featured snippets gather about 8% of all user clicks, while organic results get about 19%. A site occupying position 0 in the search results and a place on the first page of the SERPs was clearly at an advantage.
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In short, yes. The featured snippet update came as a natural continuation of a Google policy implemented with the domain diversity update of June 2019, which limited the ability of sites to appear more than once in the same search.
Pages that benefited from a place in organic results and a featured snippet have naturally registered a drop in traffic. Their position on the first page has been demoted to the second page of search results. However, according to Google, this is not guaranteed. Limiting double listing resulted in a vacuum on the first page of the SERPs, which other websites could now replace. It is important to remember that the URL is not deduplicated if it only appears for the image portion of the snippet and that the position tracking in the Google Search Console has yet to be changed.
The number of sites benefiting from double listing was insignificant, and the overall impact on the market was beneficial as it freed up a slot on the first page of the SERPs. However, moderate volatility after the update implementation could be observed in SEMrush, with the index reaching a value of 5.9, which is somewhat high but not comparable to the values encountered after implementing a core update.
Overall, the deduplicated featured update did not significantly affect SEO. Still, if you benefited from both an organic position in the top results of the SERPs and a rank in position 0 of the search engine, then you probably saw a difference in the clickthrough rates of the pages that profited from featured snippets. Calling on an SEO company such as GAMIT may be the best solution to investigate in more detail how this latest update impacted your site and may help you build an SEO strategy that will take your business to the next level.
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