Pages With Featured Snippets Get Duplicate Organic Listing Removed
In a "Deduplication" effort, Google has depreciated all top organic listings for any web page that is already holding a Featured Snippet for that same search result. This change rolled out 100% globally on Wednesday, January 22nd. Video Featured Snippets, Interesting Finds and Top Stories are not currently included in this change.
This is how Google's rep explained the change on Twitter:
If a web page listing is elevated into the featured snippet position, we no longer repeat the listing in the search results. This declutters the results & helps users locate relevant information more easily. Featured snippets count as one of the ten web page listings we show.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) January 22, 2020
Duplicated URL moving to page two of the SERPs appears to be a bug of deduplication and is not a feature or by design. URLs in featured snippets that are also ranking on page two of the search engine results pages (SERPs) may have that listing removed.
So far, this deduplication effort is NOT domain based - it's URL based. That means if you get two pages to rank for the same search result then you could feasibly still have two listings on page one. Bill Slawski shared a screenshot example of a site ranking this way after this change rolled out.
It's also important that you know this will not change any of the reporting within Google Search Console because that 2nd listing, which is now gone, was never included in the reporting.
For those asking, this causes no ...
