One Study Shows Opting-out of Google Featured Snippets Led to 12% Traffic Loss

Cyrus Shepard recently published a case study on Moz on how they ran A/B split test experiment to remove Moz Blog posts from Google featured snippets, and measure the impact on traffic. Here is the to;dr version of it

They identified blog pages with featured snippets and applied the data-nosnippet tag (not to be confused with the meta nosnippet tag) to the main content of the page. After adding the data-nosnippet tag, their test URLs quickly lost their featured snippets. Overall, they measured an estimated 12% drop in traffic for all affected pages after losing featured snippets (95% confidence level).

Significant findings of this test:

1. Google’s nosnippet tags can effectively opt-out publishers from featured snippets.
2. In this test, they measured an estimated 12% drop in traffic for all affected pages after losing featured snippets.
3. After ending the test, they failed to win back a portion of the featured snippets they previously ranked for.