They’re ALWAYS tweaking things. On the daily.

Do you think there is an external factor here too Matt?
From time to time, I see FS changes without any pages updates. It makes me thing they recently added some external factor here.
Maybe CTR or whatever.

Position in the SERPs is a high correlating factor for getting the FS.

Do you think it matters where you rank in the top5?
Being 4 or 2 changes anything?
Well anyways, I’m ranking above the current FS Winner so it should be fine.
Still testing everyday

Highly doubt it. Just keep playing around, or perhaps just increasing your organic ranking. That’s a factor as well.

I’m asking because I can pretty much rank ANY FS I target. There is just 1 page with some really juicy queries that I can’t rank no matter what.
I keep testing almost every day, but I’m starting to think there might be some sort of “penalty” here?

What do you think?

Good question… I highly doubt it works differently though.

Or you think the Snippets crawler is working differently?

Map pack.

Revert back if you want to know for sure.

No, it wasn’t a competitor beating me. I switched from regular html/css table in wordpress to the Tablepress plugin and within 48 hours lost 2 of my snippets.

I was thinking it had something to do with the extra javascript being loaded. Google doesn’t like java for mobile browsers which amounts to 50% of my traffic.

Was just wondering if it would be better to paste the raw tablepress table code into the blogpost vs the shortcode…

Don’t chalk it up to Tablepress. SEO isn’t a controlled environment. It’s quite possible your competitors have just finally outdone you. And yes, I’ve gotten snippets with Tablepress.

After going through and updating my ugly tables (to improve UX) using the Tablepress wordpress plugin I lost my snippet & traffic 🙁

IMHO Tablepress makes a lot cleaner looking table than can be made with basic html wordpress tabling from the sites wordpress theme.

I don’t understand why my snippet was removed, given UX was improved. Could it be the shortcode/javascript that gets entered being penalized by google algos? The page load time didn’t increase much either.

Are you getting any snippets using Tablepress?
If I get rid of the shortcode in the post and go back to posting the entire HTML table do you think google will give me the snippet again?

Not sure what to do.

-CAL

I would recommend to use plugins which show table of content like Wikipedia. It helps a lot in ranking. I personally prefer table of contents.

Regards

Thanks for the offer. Pretty busy these days though.

Ok, thanks for your take Matt.

And good advice to remember – I’m just so confident mine is better since I followed your steps lol But I get it.

Last resort: Offer you $1,000 to steal it back for me! 😉

Hey Tyson. I’m not aware if AMP is affecting snippet rankings. My gut feeling is, probably not. Especially since the whole point of the snippet is so that a page doesn’t need to load.

But what I can say is keep plugging away, making tweaks, and then fetch and renderings.

Remember, even though you feel like your snippet is better… its not up to you.

A few months back a Wikihow article took it over (ugh!) for half of the target KW variations.

I read this article and followed it to the letter, spending a couple hours fine tuning every last detail, taking wikihow’s snippet content and blowing it away. My snippet is better, including the keywords, photo and every point discussed in this awesome article.

My updated page was reindexed within a day. It’s been over a month, but I still can’t claim position 0 back on those KWs. I still have position 1, but traffic has been cut in half.

The only thing I can see different is wikihow’s page is an AMP page and mine is not. Is Google giving preference to AMP pages for featured snippets in mobile searches? Otherwise, I’m perplexed as I continue to tweak and tweak! Thanks

It will definitely affect it. I’ve had my actual optin text show up in the snippet. 🙂

That’s the ideal placement for it, in terms of opt-ins. But I don’t want to stop myself from getting the featured snippet.

My pleasure.

Another success story. 🙂

Can’t wait to implement this trick to my blog, Thank you so much Matt 🙂

Yup 🙂

thanks for the article, I really love it. Have you ever managed to steal a featured snippet from wikipedia? I’ve been trying to do so for a while now but so far without success.

You don’t need a plugin to rank for the snippets.

Thanks for the tip.

Good luck.

Unfortunately I’m still trying to get decent rankings for my new site, but will definitely see if and how I can accomplish this for my clients. Thanks again!

Code is code. The various table editors usually do the same thing at the end of the day.

I noticed the same thing. Google is taking all the h2’s in the content and making their own unordered list in the snippet.

It have to be related to the last update.
They changed something in how Google reads featured snippets probably.

Sorry. No idea.

Any idea? Maybe Featured Snippets algo update?
Need to fix it asap as I was ranking for many kw’s

Unordered list.

Nothing different than what I’ve said already. Maybe making sure your meta date is this year as well.

Word.

Unrelated.

Hey… its a start!

Dude, I literally just wrote a badass snippet, same length as the competitor, used scientific lingo and same structure (bulleted list) and got a snippet 1 hour after I submitted the URL. It wasn’t for the KW I was targeting, but a different LT variation, but still…

Yep.

Would it also work by using the Submit URL to index tool?

Haven’t really played around with YouTube videos in a long while.

Please revisit my part about “doing it better”. Make sure you’re checking off all the boxes.

Regards

Hi Rick, I was using Ahrefs but I could not see the quotation marks that you have mentioned in point #3.

Could you please elaborate.

Thanks
Cherie

Just want you to know, this made my day!

Duuuuuuude! I got it! just followed your steps right here…I’m super new to SEO so EXTREMELY happy that I was able to do this!!! Just put in a little bit of work and didn’t even spend that much time on it…:) Thanks so much for this!!!!

Sorry, Serg. I’ve never used it.

With “update your post” you mean just changing the content or adding new stuff? Like a new full section or just a sentence?

Would be interesting to know.

Report back when you steal that bad-boy.

Snippets are VERY dynamic.

Congrats, bro.

Report back when revenge is had.

Thanks for the clarification.

As for the tredmill website, I just checked again today and it seems treadmillreviews.net has stolen the snippet back but yesterday when I checked in several browsers, topfitnessmag.com had the snippet.

Like the poster (Niall B) mentioned bellow it seems like a game of tug a war.

Nd today.. I am in the snippets column…

Thanks a ton for the valuable info..

It does indeed seem that way. At least 10 people have already told me they’ve stolen snippets since this post was released a couple days ago.

I like the way you put that!

Great article. I’ve been using the TOC+ and TablePress plugins to snatch snippets the past 12mths. Seems since late 2016 Table snippets are getting snatched by unordered/ordered lists (most of my KWs are Amazon ‘best types).

Have you noticed that Google seems to like ‘fresh’ changes on a post as a trigger elevating into a snippet? It’s just whenever I make an update (similar to what you’ve mentioned in your post), I get the snippet in 12-24 hrs. But as soon as a competitor updates their post they snag it back.

Feels like a tug of war!

Knew tables work well but will have to get putting this into practise – I totally agree, if we don’t move with the water we’ll just get washed away!

You sure you typed it with a “?”. I’m still getting the same snippet. If I don’t use the “?” it changes to the unordered list guy that you’re seeing as well.

Anyhow, whichever snippet you’re trying to get, imitate what they’re doing. You can try to deviate as well, but there’s a risk that they genuinely prefer the format that’s already being displayed.

Normal WordPress features can handle lists and video embeds.

Search console: Fetch.

I have one question, in your example of “Best Treadmills?” it seems another site stole the rich snippet because the site in your screenshot (treadmillreviews.net) is no longer showing for this snippet, what’s interesting is the new site does not have a table.

Now, I have a shopify store and I am trying to rank the homepage but adding a table on the hompage will not look good. Now in your example with “Best Treadmills?” the new site which has stole the snippet (topfitnessmag.com) does not seem to be using a table despite the fact that previous site showing up for the snippet was using a table.

My question to you is since I am using an eCommerce site, could I simply do what topfitnessmag.com did and simply put the keyword in the H2 or H3 tage and a small 100-150 write up underneath which includes the keyword?

My competitor currently has the rich snippets and he has a table (but he has an affiliate blog), since topfitnessmag.com was able to steal it without a table could I do the same thing in my case?

How can one
force a re-crawl?
TIA

As always, I try not to miss your posts. Great stuff. I was using same principle for few months now. And saw few dozen snippet rankings. Especially, H2 tag does wonders achieving “0th” ranks.

Anyways enjoyed your post.

You mentioned TablePress for creating the markup for table type snippets. Do you have any other recommendations that can create the markup langue for other snippet types likes lists, video’s and so on?

You can definitely have one page rank for multiple snippets.

Glad to hear you’re already getting results. Plugins? I only use tablepress. Everything else I do by hand.

Whats the best plugin for structured markup?

nice article as always 🙂 I stole one featured snippet some weeks ago in the sports betting niche but was not able to steal more of them with my other websites, to thanks for your insights, gonna try them all out asap.

What also interests me is, has anybody seen a website or maybe a subpage of a website that ranks for more then 1 search term in the snippet? Or is it like 1 page can only rank for 1 featured snippet?

Thanks
Nils

Any query that has a snippet. Like the “drain” example I gave above.