Featured Snippets are special search results that are displayed just below the paid results and above the organic search results. In an inverted format compared to the other search results, they consist of a direct and immediate response to the most frequently asked questions from users, especially for mobile and voice searches.
The importance of Featured Snippets
When you do a search, on some occasions you will have noticed that, just below the first results that the search engine throws at you, a search result appears in a different format than the others. Unlike the rest, these results do not consist of the usual site URL, title, and meta description structure. These results show a description first, then the site URL, and then the title. This is the Featured Snippets.
When Google launched them a few years ago, many were scared thinking that their presence would mean less visibility and clicks for their website. But the truth is, these days if you have a featured snippet and suddenly lose it, it can be devastating to your organic traffic.
Although there are still some specialists who believe that showing a result in this way can induce the user not to click on the link (since it is assumed that they have already got the answer), various experiments carried out by SEO experts show that featured snippets have higher traffic volume and CTR (Click Through Rate) compared to conventional results.
For example, Rob Bucci, CEO of STAT calculates that the difference of visits in his favor can be between 20 and 30%. While Hubspot’s Matthew Barby highlights that the CTR rally can reach 114%.
Possible bug in Featured Snippets
Barry Schwartz, editor of Search Engine Land, today commented on the possibility that between the month of February and the current month of March there has been a bug in the Google Featured Snippets. In fact, around February 19, Google mysteriously started showing a significantly lower amount of these snippets. And suddenly, on March 12, normal levels were restored.
In some of the tools for monitoring the saturation of Featured Fragments we can observe this drop in activity:
At the moment, Google has not offered any explanation for this drop in activity. And certainly, as Barry Schwartz comments, it seems very sensible to assume some kind of bug between those dates.