Precisely three weeks after 40% of featured snippets mysteriously disappeared from Google Search, they miraculously reappeared on 12 March with the same ranking positions as before.
To this day, Google has given no explanation for the disappearance or reappearance of Featured Snippets nor confirmed whether the episode was the result of an algorithm update gone wrong, a bug or anything else.
The closest thing we got to an explanation was general commentary from Google’s John Mueller who was careful enough not to reference the sudden drop and reappearance in February and March:
“I don’t know. …The featured snippets and rich results in general, those kinds of things can fluctuate over time.
And I know the teams are always working on those features and trying to fine-tune the triggering.
So when we would show them or when we wouldn’t show them, sometimes the triggering changes over time that we just kind of reduce the threshold overall or that we change the focus a little bit and say like less here and more here. Sometimes that happens across geographies or languages.
But these kinds of changes from our side are essentially normal organic changes in search, how they can always happen.”
That’s a typically diplomatic response from John Mueller but the Featured Snippet disappearing trick was anything but “normal organic changes”.
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