Are Featured Snippets Good After All?

Moz ran an interesting experiment into the impact of Featured Snippets on website traffic, bravely gambling with their own presence in the featured snippets section of the Google Search Results.

Brief Take: When it opted out of Featured Snippets, Moz saw a 12% drop in traffic. When they re-enabled them, they didn't take the featured snippet back from the new "featured" content either - so the loss may be permanent.

So, are Featured Snippets good after all?

In a word? No. Although being "second place" after the Featured Snippet would appear to not be as good, in terms of generating traffic, as being the Featured Snippet itself, there's still a growing number of zero click searches on Google - searches that generate no traffic at all for the websites in the listing.

However, opting out of Featured Snippets is not the answer to this. Your aim, if you want to maintain and grow your website traffic, has to be to get your website into the Featured Snippet box.

All websites are fighting for a slice of the pie - Google are just taking a bigger and bigger slice for themselves.