On Friday, Bill Elward noticed how a featured snippet had a header above it that read “Advertisement.” Bill asked if this was a new Google Ad format from Google for featured snippet placement – the answer was no. The featured snippet simply picked up text on the page that said “Advertisement” and put that in the featured snippet.

When this happens, it can look bad for the site from who the featured snippet is coming up for and it can look bad for Google. But the site does have some control over that featured snippet. they can try to use the data-nosnippet robots meta tag to block Google from using portions of their page for snippets.

Here is what went down on Friday when Bill Elward posted about this:

Oh no, ads in the featured snippet area on Google, can it be? pic.twitter.com/145oMwU7mc

— Bill Elward (@billelward) March 10, 2023

I replied, this is not a featured snippet Google Ad, it is Google picking up the text on the Mayo Clinic page that says “Advertisement” and showing it in the featured snippet. Featured snippets are not ads.

Here is what I pointed out; notice the featured snippet “Advertisement” text:

So I clicked over to the page and first looked for that word, and yep, here it is:

Google’s Search Liaison confirmed this is where it came from, saying, “Correct. It’s just unfortunately picking up the word as part of the featured snippet. Not an ad. We don’t have featured snippet “ads.” Will pass it on.”

Correct. It’s just unfortunately picking up the word as part of the featured snippet. Not an ad. We don’t have featured snippet “ads.” Will pass it on.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 10, 2023

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, then recommended looking to use the nosnippet metag tag if this occurs. Glenn Gabe pointed out that it would be the data-nosnippet tag you’d want to use.

Using data-nosnippet could help here (targeting textual parts of an html page). Using nosnippet is for the page overall and probably not what you want in this case. https://t.co/84L70cDlX5

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 10, 2023

Anyway, figured I’d share and highlight this from Friday.

Forum discussion at Twitter.