Ever see one of your sites rank well for a featured snippet in Google Search but the information that was shown was not something you are proud of? Maybe it was inaccurate, maybe it has a typo, maybe it had some other issue? How do you update the featured snippet in Google so that the content is updated fast in Google Search?
That was the question that was asked to Google's John Mueller and John explained on Twitter that you cannot email Google to update that informaton, nor really use the "feedback" link to get it updated faster. Instead, what you can do is first update the content on your web page so it is what you want Google to have, then you want to get Google to recrawl and reindex the page. To do that, you want to update "the sitemap's last modified date, or for individual URLs, by using Inspect URL + Submit to indexing in Search Console," John said.
Here are the steps to get your Google featured snippet updated quickly in Google Search:
(1) Update the content on your web page, the content Google is pulling from for the featured snippet.
(2) Get Google to recrawl and index that page by updating the last modified date in your sitemap file and/or using the Google Search Console Inspect URL tool and submit to indexing button.
John Mueller of Google explained "We don't tweak these manually."
Here are those tweets:
These update automatically as we recrawl & reindex the pages. You can help by updating the sitemap's last modified date, or for individual URLs, by using Inspect URL + Submit to indexing in Search Console. We don't tweak these manually.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 20, 2021
I should add, if you do change the content, it may result in you no longer ranking for that featured snippet.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
