Google’s Featured Snippets can be a very important location for special types of contents. However, Google has set certain limitations that stops certain kinds of it to show up there. You must be pretty sure about these Google policies and only try to show up content that is legalized by the search engine giant.

Google has recently been quite keen on letting out some of the restricted censorships around the types of contents allowed in their Featured Snippets. There have also been talks about possible blacklisting of certain content types and yet there has not been an official statement around it. When asked, Google did provide some insight as to what type of content is eligible to be highlighted in their Featured Snippets placements.

So, What Are Featured Snippets?

Well, if you have been around Google latterly (past year or so), these featured snippets have been quite evident. These are usually small blocks of content secured from web pages worldwide. Located at the top of search results for some specific search queries, these Featured Snippets have been quite useful in providing searchers answers that they might be looking for. However, the form that they might appear in can vary from bullet points to images, tables and also in paragraph shape.

Purpose behind these is to give searchers quick answers for their search queries. Google Assistant can also read information in Featured Snippets aloud when required.

What Types of Content Are to be Kept Out of Featured Snippets?

As useful as these Featured Snippets have been, there are certain types of contents that will not be shown in them. Some of the most significant categories in these blocked contents from featured snippets are:

• Hateful content of any kind
• Sexually explicit content even if it might be validated
• Violent content of all types
• Dangerous and harmful content
• Categories including civic, scientific, medical and historical issues that may lack consensus on public interest

For the last-mentioned category, Google went the distance of designing systems to generally prevent Op-Ed content from appearing into Featured Snippets in search results. This in fact means that there would be exclusions for content that is from sites or pages that may have highly polarized content that is also unlikely to represent consensus viewpoints on a range of sensitive topics.

Featured Snippets directly highlight possible answers to queries put in by searchers. As special formatting is done on content to be shown in these little snippets, categories like civics or medical information where content might actually lack broad consensus will be prevented under policies from Google. Furthermore, Google systems are designed to prevent content in Featured Snippets that might violate their polices in any possible way. However, this does not have any impact of any kind on page rankings in organic search listings.

What Does Google Do to Keep Content Out of Featured Snippets?

Deep down, Google has designed and implemented algorithms that help detect and automatically remove the non-allowed types of content. Any content that doesn’t meet content policies from Google falls under this category.

Number of searches Google handles on a daily are astronomical. They simply cannot rely on human verifications on each type of content search and manually remove all non-allowed snippets. According to Google, their systems do the best job of automatically not showing featured snippets that are in violation of any of their policies. They also admit that the scale of search so large that perfection cannot be met. For that, they have provided the public reporting system as well.

There are measures in place that tell Google about which type of content can violate their policies. Sensitive topics and a large range of non-allowed view points can be managed by algorithms. There are algorithmic generated lists that help identify a large number of sites that can have polarized content.

According to Google, a large number of such sites are also non-political, which might come as a surprise to many. There is also no type of encoding that helps Google learn political preferences for products including none in Google Search.

Manual action is also taken by Google in case these algorithmic lists fait to perform their task. Users can also help with this by reporting featured snippets to Google by clicking on the “feedback” button that is positioned under every featured snippet. Their manual team will be notified of the issue and action will be taken in due time.

No Effect in Core Google Search

Even though any of your content might not be allowed to appear in Featured Snippets, there will be no effect for it in Core Google Search. It would still rank as any content would naturally only barring its appearance in these snippets. Google also verified a site’s ranking ability and said it would just be as normal as any other site would have that does rank in featured snippets.

There is no impact on long term rankings as well and also no penalty applied on these sites in usual web rankings. Naturally, you get the idea that featured snippets are kept separated by Google from core search rankings. Whether or not your content manages to appear in them, has no impact on any of your ranking.

Why You Should Care?

As they are designed, featured snippets can bring much traffic to any website from Google searches. These are short quick answers to search queries from users and are likely to boost rankings by landing more visitors on your site as well. These can also provide great traffic from Google Assistant and also Google Home device voice queries.

You have to keep in mind that this is also piece of content that can also be read out aloud by home devices and smart devices alike. Typically, you would definitely want your content to show up in a featured snippet to get all its benefits. Optimizing your content for certain search queries is also a great way of landing it in featured snippets. Also, if your content fails to show up in one, you need not to worry about any of your core rankings.

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