Google Issues Comprehensive Guide to Featured Snippets

A few years ago, the introduction of features snippets to Google was a major boon. It helped people to get a quicker, easier answer to any queries that they had about the content. Featured snippets, however, have become even more immersive since they were first introduced. In a bid to try and make it easier understood, Google has put together a guide to help us better understand said new snippets.

Interested to hear what the search engine thinks of its new changes and additions? Read about it here. You should be able to easily learn to understand the more detailed side of the said snippets. With the main reason for their development arguably due to mobile search and voice-activated searches, there’s much to be understood about this important new feature.

One of the main reasons for the change, in line with the above, is that, according to Google:

the traditional ’10 blue links’ format doesn’t work as well, making featured snippets an especially useful format.

because featured snippets aren’t meant as a sole source of information…. …they’re part of an overall set of results we provide, giving people information from a wide range of sources,

the traditional ’10 blue links’ format doesn’t work as well, making featured snippets an especially useful format.

So, this is clearly an important part of their new search marketing strategy. While normal listings will still be shown alongside the featured snippets, meaning nobody is being pushed down, getting featured is very important.

There’s also the new addition of the “Featured Clip” system, which helps to show a quick a video to answer your query. If you were to search for a song, for example, you might get a link to the song being listed on YouTube by the official producer.

Google Featured Snippets: What Does This Mean?

For one, Google has been very open that this new system still needs considerable work to get it 100% right. It’s not perfect by any means, as some people know how to game the system to produce spam and offensive results. With ‘more work to do’ on top of the present features, we expect to see continual improvements to Google Featured Snippets.

The aim is eventually to perhaps add a ‘More Results’ feature for people to browse through some of the top snippets. Whatever happens, this feature is here to stay and, per the blog post above, is likely to keep changing.

Also, the addition of search tags and keywords to help better diversify a search query is very important. At the moment, we can also have multiple featured snippets appear at once. While by no means perfect, the Google Featured Snippets feature is only just starting out. Got a problem or concern? Then you can easily let Google know!

Just use the Feedback feature in any Featured Snippet you come across that isn’t correct. Helping Google to perfect this system will have a positive net benefit for everyone for years to come.

Source: Google Blog