Google announced a new update to featured snippets. From now, Google will take the users to the relevant text on the web page for some featured snippet results.
On 3rd June, Google SearchLiaison tweeted about Google’s Featured Snippet’s update. Now, clicking on many featured snippets will take the users directly to the text that is relevant to the search query.
However, the change is not meant for all featured snippets. It is only happening where Google is confident enough to direct the users straight to the content.
SearchLiaison also announced via Twitter that no special markup is needed or nothing to add for Google to send users directly to the content.
Another important aspect (not announced) is Google is now highlighting the text. When the users are taken directly to the content page, the relevant text is being highlighted.
The interesting fact is, Google is changing the URL and adding extra parameters to it. We can assume that this might open up a new way to track visitors to a site from featured snippets when the featured snippets use the new URL parameters.
The URL parameter is starting this way:
.com/tbt-bhpn#:~:text=
It is possible to recreate the highlighting effect on your own web page. To do it, you have to add the above URL parameter to your own webpage, and then after the = sign, add words from that page. The added text will turn into highlighted text.
If it can be done successfully, publishers can track Google referrals more precisely.
AMP had this feature earlier. Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP is an HTML framework that displays content to mobile users in a way that downloads quickly. These changes will be good for users as well as for publishers.