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

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:

No

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) June 9, 2020

Forum discussion at Twitter.

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

That's not an opt-out for highlighting that's being described. We don't have an opt-out for that, other than opting-out of featured snippets. I understand your desire for not having to opt-out. That said, I think we always balance between what's best for both users and sites....

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) June 10, 2020

So in your world, it's like just add some code if you want and opt-in to this new feature. But for people focused on just running sites, it's like "Why don't I have this? I have to add what code? Do I pay someone for this? And it's the opt-in-snippet-highlight tag?....

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) June 10, 2020

But also recall this has been happening with AMP pages for over a year. We have plenty of feedback and experience with it. It's not some entirely new thing, and it follows on us having run a lot of tests.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) June 10, 2020