Jan 22, 2020, Google rolled out a significant update to the first page of search results. Web pages in a featured snippet position will no longer be repeated in regular organic listings. We want to measure impact of this recents change to featured snippets on Wikipedia traffic.
Key Takeaways:
- This change applies to multiple languages and in both mobile and desktop.
- Webpages in a featured snippet position have had their regular organic results pushed back to the top of Page 2, or even on Page 3, is not guaranteed. If lose featured snippet, the results will probably return to page 1
- Google Search Console doesn’t differentiate featured snippets from regular results. In addition it can't be inferred from webrequest logs (it's cleansed from the referer)
Plan & Suggestions:
- Look at overall traffic across wikipedias and in english wikipedia before and after the change.
- Going through the top 50 or 100 pages on Google search console by clicks and check how they show up.
- Use data from SEO company to identify pages show up in featured snippet, compare the change