Google's featured snippets now highlight results on web pages
Google has rolled out a new feature in snippets – the little box that sometimes appears after you enter a search, just before web page results. If you see such a snippet and click on it, Google will take you to the web page that it pulled the information from and scroll down automatically to the highlighted text, SearchEngineLand reports.
Google’s public search liaison Danny Sullivan confirmed that the feature has been in testing for more than a year: “We’ve done this regularly with AMP pages since December 2018. We tested with HTML pages last year, as noted. We now do it regularly HTML pages, since last week”. There’s no additional markup required by webmasters and the new feature should be live if the browser supports it.
As nifty and helpful as it is, this feature could mean trouble for SEO and advertising. Taking users directly to a specific section of a web page will allow them to bypass ads and call to action elements. This may force websites to change the location of ads to guarantee exposure. It’s still early days, and we have to wait and see how things unfold.