Preventing Google's Featured Snippet Scroll Won't Lead To Snippet Removal

Jun 10, 2020 • 7:31 am | comments (2) by | Filed Under Google Search Engine Optimization
 

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Last week we covered how Google launched for some browsers and some featured snippets that Google will highlight and scroll down to the content of the featured snippet on your web page. As expected, some publishers and web site owners are not happy about it. But did you know you can opt out and still have featured snippets within Google?

There is a specific opt out for the scroll-to-text fragment where you can specify "Document-Policy: force-load-at-top" by serving this in the HTTP header. This should stop the browser from scrolling you down to the section of the page that is cited in the featured snippet.

Even better, it should not cause any damage for that page to show up as a Google featured snippet. So you do not need to opt out of your snippets all together or try to mess with the number of characters in the snippet to hide your featured snippet. You can use this document policy to opt out of the scroll.

Danny Sullivan of Google was asked if this would result in not having a featured snippet and he said no:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: Some more on this from Google's perspective - by Danny Sullivan:

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