There has been an enormous amount of confusion around the Google featured snippet duplication change. In short, Google made the change, didn't communicate the change was done until SEOs saw it live and Google, mostly Danny Sullivan, has been answering questions over-and-over again around this change. But to be fair, Danny posted retroactively a ton of this information on the @searchliaison over here as we covered previously.
So I thought it would be useful to summarize everything you need to know about this change in one simple bulleted list that someone can then take and make into an infographic in an effort to build natural links.
Credit to @darth_na for getting this started:
- Featured snippets are now part of the main organic search results
- Featured snippets are counted as the first position
- Google removes that URL from showing elsewhere in the core search results when it is displayed in the featured snippets
- Images in featured snippets are not deduplicated if that URL is different from the text version of the featured snippet
- Refined featured snippets, the ones that let you filter down more with bubbles, people also ask or other refinements are not deduplicated
- Top stories, image carousels, local listings, and other vertical search integrations are not deduplicated either because they are not featured snippets
- Normal knowledge panels, direct answers and so on are also not deduplicated
- Right side featured snippets were deduplicated, now they are not
- Right side featured snippets will eventually move to the top left position
- To opt out of featured snippets try using the max-snippet control and reduce the size of your snippet so Google cannot show it anymore. If you use the nosnippet tag, you won't have a snippet in the core web results, so use max-snippet.
- This does not impact your Search Console performance reports
- This deduplication change rolled out on Wednesday, January 22, 2020
I think this covers everything, if I missed anything, let me know in the comments or on Twitter and I will add it above.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: Here is an updated chart from Lyndon NA:
And though @rustybrick beat me to it,
— Lyndon NA (Darth Autocrat) (@darth_na) January 30, 2020
(https://t.co/wllvNsOvIn)
but here's the updated image, with the suggestions by Barry and @taylorannberg: pic.twitter.com/SdJn0CnFgP
