I’d earlier shared my experiences while chasing featured snippets. It was what we all dreamed of achieving but after you made that position zero (or 1 now), you feel the hit on your traffic.
If you find yourself in this mess of losing traffic to snippets, like me, you may want to know if you have to give in to what Google had thrown at you or if you can back out and get your traffic again.
The answer to that concern is yes, you can stop your content from being featured for snippets and gain back your traffics, clicks, conversions, subscribers, and sales.
Below is a list of what many others and I had done to discontinue our content from being featured for Google snippets, gain back the lost traffic, and in fact, add more without stress.
Methods to Stop Your Content From Appearing for Google Snippets
While the first three methods will be dived into using codes, you may adapt the last two if you're no-code-man.1. Delete Snippet Codes from Your Website/Blog
In fact, you’re the one that allowed them to use your content as it's already coded with your website or blog template.
The first technical means of stopping Google from featuring your content for snippets is by using the prescribed codes below.
To prevent Google from displaying snippets and Instant Preview for your page, place this tag in the <HEAD> section of your page:
<meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet">
Note that this tag will prevent previews from appearing in regular search results too, but will not affect previews on ads or your ranking.
If you want your page to have a snippet in search results but want to prevent Google from using description information from the Open Directory Project, you can use the robot's meta tag.
In order words, using this code had just deleted the code of snippet from your HTML Head.
Source: SEOClerks
2. Delete Snippet Code for Specific Pages
The technical method above is meant to opt out of Google snippets completely. What if you still want to retain some pages for snippets but otherwise for certain content?In this case, use the code below.
To any page that you want to be blocked from featured snippets, add the max-snippet tag and set a max number of characters you’d like to allow for a snippet.
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:100" />
3. Break the Snippets Down in the Posts
Personally, I don’t toy with my codes. I understand a delete of just a character by error can affect a major part of my blog.To avoid tampering wrongly with codes or if you don’t just have a good knowledge of manipulating codes, then take to the method below. It works perfectly.
- First, search for your keywords. You can use Google Console/Webmasters to collect keywords that visitors are using on your pages. Searching for the keywords on Google will show you if your content is appearing in snippets or not.
- Sample all these snippet-featured posts and the statements being captured by Google for featuring.
- Go to each affected post and break those bulky paragraphs down into two or more paragraphs. You may change the words contained there if you won’t lose the primary meaning of your posts.
These simple steps help and you don’t have to worry about mixing things up with the codes.
4. Use Conversational Tones
For your subsequent content (and where you can edit the old ones), use a conversational or informal tone rather than an academic or a formal presentation.I remember sharing this method as one of the methods to write evergreen content. Let me briefly explain that here too.
See, the one main way your statements and paragraphs will often be picked up for snippets is if you write bricks of paragraphs.
Break things down as said in method 3 above.
However, it's time-consuming if you must correct things again after you’ve made the mistakes.
To take charge of no-snippet content from the very start, I recommend conversational and narrative writing instead of former, academic, instructional, or step-by-step guides.
Listing items, using tables, quoted statements, and defining words/phrases like your typical dictionary will force your content into Google snippets.
Seat your readers right in front and talk to them one-on-one and in an unofficial tone. Then, snippets will hate you.
5. Retain The Snippets But Lure People to Read More
I don't doubt that all the methods above are working. However, I don't doubt it, as well that, for any other reason, you may still be seeing your posts on snippets after you had applied all. In this case, what can you do?The same happened to me in a few of my posts. So what did I do?
I let Google retain the snippets. Then, I find a means to include a sentence, clause, phrase, or word in that paragraph such that readers will be lured into reading the rest of the post. That will force them to want to read more.
For instance, if you search on Google "minimum age for admissions", my post may, probably, remain in position zero to date. People will get their answers directly on that result page, of course. Yet, I included a statement, "In this post are references to that".
With this sentence, readers will want to know what the references are or probably there are more things they must know further.
6. Opt out using Search Console
If you have a Google Search Console account, you can use the "Search Appearance" feature to opt out of Featured Snippets. Go to "Search Appearance" and select "Featured Snippets." From there, you can choose to opt out of Featured Snippets for your website.
If you want to opt out of a specific featured snippet using Google's Search Console, follow these steps:
- Log in to your Google Search Console account.
- Select the website you want to work on.
- Click on the "Performance" tab in the left-hand menu.
- Scroll down to the "Search Appearance" section and click on "Rich Results".
- Look for the featured snippet you want to remove and click on it.
- Click on the "Feedback" button.
- Select the option "This featured snippet is not helpful" and provide a reason why.
- Submit the feedback.
Opting Out of Snippets Won't Affect Rankings
No, it won’t, except you block Google from crawling your website by adding a robots.txt file to your website's root directory. This will prevent your website from appearing in the search results altogether, so it's not recommended.Not until later, Google usually repeated snippet-featured content, again, as the number three or four on the same search results. It was later stopped, thereby a post featured on a snippet will not be shown in the rest of the result.
Anyway, it’s just to stop repetition – nothing more.
What we learned when they showed a result twice was that the snippet content was already ranked meritoriously. The posts already merit their first, second, or third position on the result pages. It just has something Google can quickly feature at position zero (0).
In other words, if your content must be on the snippet, it means it is already ranked content for that page one of those keywords. Hence, if you stop them from the snippets, they will retain their positions on the result page.
Except for any other factors that may drop your rankings, stopping Google snippets doesn’t affect your ranking.
Conclusion
You wouldn’t be on this page if you’d not perceived or confirmed that you’re losing a juice of traffic to Google snippets. Hence, your primary achievement here is how you can use codes or other proven methods to stop your content from being featured.These had worked for me and several others. You will also experience a surge in your traffic if your traffic was truly drained by snippets unless otherwise.
What did I get wrong in this post? Did you experience similar issues with snippets? Have you used any of these methods without success or do you have a testimony to share? Comment below to share your views.
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