If you are trying to land a featured snippet, are you better serving up a brand new page to take advantage of freshness? Or are you better to tweak a currently ranked but older page to make it more appealing as a featured snippet option?
While we do see featured snippets change from one site to the next, does Google switch them based on the content being fresher? I asked Gary Illyes at Big Digital Adelaide whether featured snippet favors fresh content or as long as it answers the question, if Google is fine to keep older content as a featured snippet.
I would go for the second. Typically we just want to surface the snippet that we believe answers the user question, we don’t actually care when the content was written. It happens very often that the snippet that is featured is coming from an article that was written in ’99.
For example, recently I ran into a featured snippet about BackRub, which was the first version of Google that was running on the Stanford servers, and that was published in, I want to say ’97 but it might have been ’98. It wasn’t changed since then, it had a featured snippet, it answered my question. Well, I did click through because I wanted to learn more about it.
So you don’t need to worry that your content is stale if you are featured in one of Google’s featured snippets, as long as the information answers the question and is accurate.
Jennifer Slegg
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