Last Updated on 3 years by School4Seo Team

Featured snippets are the boxes where search results are shown with extra descriptions. Featured snippets are shown in the 1st position in the organic results. In some cases, it is displayed on the right side of the result page.

Examples of Featured Snippets

Most of the featured snippets are shown as a paragraph. In some special cases, bullets and tables format are also shown.

See the above picture. I searched “What are the Featured Snippets?” on Google. I have highlighted the featured snippet with a green rectangle box.

Where is it displayed?

Earlier this featured snippet was displayed on position 0. It means the 1st result was counted after the snippet. But after 23 Jan 2022, snippets are shown in 1st position. It was announced by Google’s official Twitter handle.

If a web page listing is elevated into the featured snippet position, we no longer repeat it in the first page of results. This declutters the results & helps users locate relevant information more easily. Featured snippets count as one of the ten web page listings we show….

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) January 23, 2020

It means the concept of “position 0” doesn’t exist now.

A disadvantage of Featured Snippets

Your website’s CTR will be decreased immediately after getting the 1st rank. Because the user won’t click to see the result but Google will fetch the relevant content from the webpage and show that on the page itself. If a user finds the answer without clicking on the website, then there won’t be any reason to click.

Can we stop our website’s content to be shown in the featured snippet?

Yes, there are some methods to protect your website from being shown in the featured snippet.

Method for protecting the website from being shown in the featured snippet

Google has suggested a way for it.

If you want to retain snippets in regularly-formatted search results, but you don’t want to appear in featured snippets, experiment with setting the max-snippet tag to lower lengths. Featured snippets will only appear if enough text can be shown to generate a useful featured snippet.

Source: Google’s Article for Featured Snippet

In the case of conflicting robots (or googlebot) meta tags, the more restrictive tag applies. For example, if a page has both the max-snippet:50 and nosnippet tags, the nosnippet tag will apply.

Source: Google’s Article on Special Tags