A featured snippet on the Google Search Result Page is the small rectangular box that you see above the result listings on the first page. Before the deduplication change was announced by Google, a website that showed up as a featured snippet was usually ranked on the search result first page. With the Google Featured Snippet Deduplication change announced on 22nd January 2020, if a site owns a featured snippet, the website link or URL will no longer appear on the same page.
Here are the details of the new deduplication change announced:
- Google has made the change to help users browse search results more effectively and easily. The endeavor is to keep the first page of search results as clean and simple as possible.
- As per the deduplication change, if a site has been elevated to Featured snippet, it will no longer be repeated in the search results below – in other words, the featured snippet is now part of the main organic search results. Therefore, it has been named as the deduplication change. The purpose of the deduplication change is to remove the duplicated URL from the page listing since it already shows in the Featured Snippet.
- Danny Sullivan from Google tweeted about the same on 23rd January on Twitter. He mentions that featured snippets will be treated as one of the ten listings on the first page that is shown by Google.
- Only True Featured Snippets will get counted for this purpose.
- Carousels People Also Ask, and Bubbles will not be taken as Featured Snippets.
- Local listings, top stories, direct answers, standard knowledge panels and some of the other similar search integrators will be not be deduplicated as they do not own featured snippets.
- As is evident from Danny Sullivan’s tweet, Featured Snippets are now the number one rank on the Google SERP.
- Google will not feature the link or the website again in its search results – the one that is featured in the Featured Snippet. However, if there is a different website link or URL then it can be ranked on the page listing.
- Reports that the duplicated URL is being pushed and featured in page 2 is not true as it was a bug that has been taken care of by Google.
- Website owners and administrators that do not wish to use their site as a Featured Snipper, need to use the feature -. By decreasing the number, they will be able to decrease the length of the snippet. Google search engine will not then take it to be a featured snippet anymore.
- However, websites should not use because this feature will remove the snippet from the core web results.
- Deduplication will in no way affect the websites’ s Search Console Performance.
- The featured snippets on the right-hand side will move to the left-hand side, top position on the page. The deduplication of the featured snippets showing on the right-hand side of the page has been stopped till the time they do get moved to the top-left position.
