ISVWorld News - Opting-Out of Google Featured Snippets Led to 12% Traffic Loss [SEO Experiment]

Publishers worried because older studies suggested winning featured snippets drove less actual traffic than the "natural" top ranking result. Working with the team at SearchPilot, we devised an A/B split test experiment to remove Moz Blog posts from Google featured snippets, and measure the impact on traffic. A majority of us also expected to see a negative impact on traffic, but wanted to measure exactly how much, and identify whether the featured snippets would return after we removed the tag. Overall, we measured an estimated 12% drop in traffic for all affected pages after losing featured snippets (95% confidence level). To summarize the significant findings of this test: For the vast majority of publishers winning the featured snippet likely remains the smart strategy.