Over the past several years, Google has moved to provide people with a direct answer when they search. These “Featured Snippets” power Google Assistant queries, and the company is now making a tweak to not repeat them in web results.
The Google Search Liaison on Twitter shared this morning that pages providing Featured Snippet answers will no longer be repeated in the first page of results. According to the company, deduplication “only happens for the exact URL in the featured snippet and only within the first page of results.”
This is aimed at decluttering results by reducing duplicates, and “helps users locate relevant information more easily.” In theory, this guarantees one new page for the 10 blue links and ensures that every result displayed is unique.
There’s no change to the overall set of web results we are showing. There are still 10 unique listings, as before. Deduplicating simply means we’re no longer showing any of those unique listings twice.
Other cards/carousels like Top Stories, Interesting Finds, and videos will not be deduplicated, and continue to function like before. While a “deduplicated URL may appear on the second page of results,” Google says that isn’t intentional or a guaranteed placement.
The tweak is completely rolled out around the world as of yesterday, with Google noting that there are no other changes.
-
- After
More about Google Search:
- Featured Snippets now show the most up-to-date answers
- Google explains what appears in Search Featured Snippets, Autocomplete, more
- Google Search Featured Snippets highlighting answers on linked AMP articles
- Google Search can now show multiple quick answers to your questions w/ multifaceted Featured Snippets
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Comments