Search giant Google has announced that it has completed an update to its featured snippets within its search results pages.
For some featured snippets, the company will take the user to the section of the web page where the text within the snippet is located.
The announcement was made on Twitter via the Google SearchLiaison account on last Wednesday, June 3rd. It explained that when a user clicks on some featured snippets, they will be taken directly to the text that was relevant to their search query.
As we have done with AMP pages since December 2018, clicking on a featured snippet now takes users to the exact text highlighted for HTML pages, when we can confidently determine where the text is, for browsers that support the underlying technology….
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 3, 2020
It is noted that this change will not affect every featured snippet and will only be applied to the snippets where Google believes it is confident that it can direct users straight to the relevant content.
In a follow-up tweet, the SearchLiaison account stated that there was no special mark-up required, and nothing for site owners to add in order for the search engine to send visitors directly to the content they are interested in. If Google’s systems cannot be confident where to direct the user after they have clicked, or if their browser doesn’t support this technology, then the user will be taken to the top of the page.
There is no markup needed by webmasters. This happens automatically, using Scroll To Text for HTML pages https://t.co/cE9O2cBgKu. See also more background here: https://t.co/vKFmR3HLK3
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 3, 2020
What wasn’t announced in the tweet, but is part of the update, is that the text will be highlighted. When a user clicks on a featured snippet that has been applied with the new update, they will be direct to the page and the text that they could see within the snippet will be highlighted. This idea was trialled by Google last year.
With this new update, users may well skip passed ads and any other calls-to-action to jump directly to the content that first interested them. This could prompt SEOs to track what featured snippets their sites are ranking for, and could lead them to restructure their content so that their call to actions are located in a place closer to the highlighted text.
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