Note: This post was co-authored by Cyrus Shepard and Rida Abidi[1].
Everyone wants to win Google featured snippets. Right?
At least, it used to be that way. Winning the featured snippet[2] typically meant extra traffic, in part because Google showed your URL twice: once in the featured snippet and again in regular search results. For publishers, this was known as "double-dipping."
All that changed in January when Google announced[3] they would de-duplicate search results to show the featured snippet URL only once on the first page of results. No more double-dips.
Publishers worried because older studies[4] suggested winning featured snippets drove less actual traffic than the "natural" top ranking result. With the new change, winning the featured snippet might actually now lead to less traffic, not more.
This led many SEOs[5] to speculate: should you opt-out of featured snippets altogether? Are featured snippets causing publishers to lose more traffic than they potentially gain?
Here's how we found the answer.
The experiment
Working with the team at SearchPilot[6], we devised an A/B split test experiment to remove Moz Blog posts from Google featured snippets, and measure the impact on traffic.
Using Google's data-nosnippet tag[7], we identified blog pages with winning featured snippets and applied the tag to the main content of the page.
Our working hypothesis was that these pages would lose their featured snippets and return to the "regular" search results below. A majority of us also expected to see a negative impact on traffic, but wanted to measure exactly how much, and identify whether the featured snippets would return after we removed the tag.
In this example, Moz lost the featured snippet almost immediately. The