Pete Meyers from Moz was tweeting yesterday about how the featured snippets at the end of October have significantly changed. He said "it looks like a lot of the SERPs that lost Featured Snippets around the end of October gained general Knowledge Panels." Which are better? Featured snippets or knowledge panels? Well, it depends on the panel you are in.
Here are his tweets:
It looks like a lot of the SERPs that lost Featured Snippets around the end of October gained general Knowledge Panels. Some examples: mba, crm, erp, buddhism, hosting, web design. Organic opportunity replaced with Knowledge Graph.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) November 21, 2017
There was a big jump in Knowledge Panels at the end of October, almost entirely general knowledge entries/definitions from Wikipedia.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) November 21, 2017
Now, if you look at both Mozcast and RankRanger they both show significant fluctuations with those featured snippets showing in the search results.
Mozcast:
RankRanger:
Brain Patternson recently did a story on this at Search Engine Land around how the featured snippets are gone and he thinks it is a bug. But it is unclear.
Featured snippets are constantly changing and adapting, so it is unclear what their future holds.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
