I’m not sure if anyone cares about this except for me, but it is a neat little discovery new to Google search results pages.

Recently I wrote about Google featured snippets showing content from “hot topics”. That means, they know when a topic is hot and then produce a featured snippet. I was personally able to get a featured snippet in under 4 hours.

But I have also been seeing a lot of featured snippets pulled from pages only a few hours old which are Google News approved sites whose pages show up in the new “Top Stories” section.

As seen in the screenshot below, searching for a recent event, such as a car accident in Los Angeles, Google provides a featured snippet box with content pulled from the news story.

This screenshot shows featured snippets showing content from “top stories”.

I have searched this term daily for a week, and the featured snippet constantly changes. Unfortunately, there are a lot of vehicle accidents in the LA area, making it a perfect way to test the new feature in Google.

I believe this began occurring in late December 2016 or early January 2017.

What is also neat about this: if you are the first to break a story, you could potentially show up in a featured snippet, in top stories, and in organic search results, getting 3 positions on page 1. This happened to me recently and the traffic was through the roof.

Len
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On January 15, 2017   /   SEO News & Tips   /   Leave a comment

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