Featured snippets and date changes

As an SEO, you tend to see Google make changes. Lots of changes. Regular changes. So many changes.

For Google, these changes are built to make its search engine the best in the world, and while some of these changes appear to be good for you and your clients, others will likely be less so.

The reality of making search content as strong as possible and less likely to struggle against the tide of a constantly shifting search engine is to follow the rules: ensure you’re writing great content people will search for, make sure the technical side of your website checks out, and keep doing it. Over and over again.

The better you do, the better the result, and if you keep doing it, you may be rewarded with a featured snippet.

What is a featured snippet?

The holy grail of search results, a featured snippet is a result that Google’s engine sees as the best result for the search, rewarding it with prime real estate that sits above the search engine results page and just below that the ads.

It’s a special spot, and the one that Google Assistant and Google Home will likely read out when someone asks the search engine a question using their voice.

You can call it a in, because it definitely is, and while you can aim for those spots, you also can’t necessarily guarantee them.

In fact, depending on the age of the search, you may find a different featured snippet available.

Will featured snippets changed by search date? Apparently yes.

We’ve known for a while that featured snippets will change over time. That’s just Google doing what it does and changing to an ever-growing, ever-evolving index. No issues there.

However this week, we’ve found that Google’s featured snippets can change based on the date applied to the search. Not everyone is going to use these tools, and you can hazard a guess that few apply date limitations to a search, but it could help you get an understanding not just of what you need to gain that holier featured snippet position, but also if your content is quality enough to be considered for one.

Take the search for “personal loans” which doesn’t normally include a featured snippet in the result.

But if you add a date controller to search for the past year, you find a snippet suddenly materialises.

Thinking this was perhaps a glitch, a check was made on numerous searches, finding that the featured snippet could change dependent on the time stamp you were applying.

For instance if you drop the time back on that search from the past year to the past month, the snippet remains the same, but loses the image. If you drop it back to a the past week, the snippet changes.

The takeaway from this might be that featured snippets can be applied to more than just the standard search, and are working with date controls in search as well.

Granted, not as many people use dates in their searches, sure, but as Google evolves its voice technology and Google Assistant becomes more relied on, you might hear someone apply a search more like “search for personal loan rates in the past year”, which would deliver a different voiced result — based on this finding — than one just merely said “search for personal loan rates”.

Worth mentioning is that featured snippets for date structures are likely to be very difficult to track. At the best of times, services like SEMRush can provide a glimpse into whether you have a featured snippet for a search, but due to the fact that SEMRush isn’t Google, the information might be out of date by the time it’s reported.

However checking those same searches and running the date stamp on your own incognito search may provide an understanding as to whether you had the right information, and what you can hopefully boost your own results by.

Search engines are ideally looking for the best information for the user, and so learning what you’ve hopefully managed to get right versus what perhaps the competition is doing can help you achieve that coveted featured snippet position, bringing you back to the same basic rules of SEO: ensure you’re writing great content people will search for, make sure the technical side of your website checks out, and keep doing it. Over and over again.

Google will take care of the rest.