From the course: Danny Sullivan on SEO

Direct answers and featured snippets

From the course: Danny Sullivan on SEO

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Direct answers and featured snippets

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- One of the big changes that's happened with search engines is that they're not just trying to give you links to material, they're actually trying to give you direct answers or something that Google calls featured snippets. If you've ever done a search and you see a little box at the top and you get a definition, that's a feature snippet or direct answer. They're just trying to answer your question without having to send you someplace else. Now this has been worrisome to a number of publishers because there's been a contract with the search engines that we've had. We will let you access all of our content for free and you will send us traffic. And now if you're actually providing the answer that you've gotten from our web page, then why does anybody need to click through to me and then you're kind of breaking the contract. But, over the past two years or so it really seems to have been more people find that these direct answers are indeed sending them traffic, to the degree that we don't have as many discussions about whether this is a good thing or whether this is a bad thing that should be prevented, as much as how do I get to be one of these things. Where it may change though, is when we start getting into voice search. And especially when we get into these assistant devices like the Google Home where you're able to do a search by voice, it comes back with an answer and it may tell you the name of the source that it got it from. There really is no ability to click through on that. And so that exchange becomes more dubious. Am I really getting the value off of that? But we may find that the search engines decide that if they're using a lot of content from something off of voice search, that there's another way that they can reward it perhaps in the search results when you're more hand on. We don't know yet. It's definitely an area to be watching, but when it comes to the typed in search, people seem to be comfortable with the idea that these have been paying off, the feature snippets and the direct answers.

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