On Friday Google posted a new blog post about an old feature that confused some in thinking what Google was talking about was new. In short, Google told me the reason the company posted about it was because they wanted to remind retailers before the holiday season of these controls but confirmed there were no new features being launched on Friday.
Almost a year ago, last September 2019, Google launched new snippet controls that allow you to control some of how your snippets appear in the search results. Google is just reminding you that these snippet controls can be used by retailers and e-commerce sites as well, to control how their snippets appear.
I emailed Google about this when I saw the story and a Google spokesperson responded "we're just clarifying existing controls for retailers ahead of the holiday shopping season to make it clear what their options are."
I asked if this reminder had anything to do with GoogleBot adding items to carts and Google said no, it is unrelated.
Google did make clarifications specific to retailers about these controls saying the "preferences do not apply to information supplied via schema.org markup on the page itself. The schema.org markup needs to be removed first, before these opt-out mechanisms can become active." Google also added that "the opt-out preferences do not apply to product data submitted through Google Merchant Center, which offers specific mechanisms to opt-out products from appearing on surfaces across Google."
Google also provided clearer screen shots as illustrations for each of the snippet control tags:
(1) "nosnippet" robots meta tag
(2) "max-snippet:[number]" robots meta tag
(3) "max-image-preview:[setting]" robots meta tag
(4) "data-nosnippet" HTML attribute
Forum discussion at Twitter.
