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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>Now Google is using the same content and depriving them of the traffic.

I found some instructions[1] that says a website can opt out of Google's Featured Snippets with special HTML code:

  <meta name=”googlebot” content=”nosnippet”>

Are there any cases of websites deliberately opting out of snippets and therefore seeing their referral links (and ad revenue) increase?

[1] https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/27/google-featured-sni...

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It's hard for me to shake the vague feeling that this feels like someone setting up on the sidewalk in front of your property and saying hey, you could have done X, Y, or Z, to stop me from being here. And you say, I did do X. And they say, oh, X was two years ago. Y was last year. Now you have to do Z. Until next year when it'll be AA. And weirdly, AA is the exact opposite of X, because what you thought would take care of things two years ago now penalizes you.

It's not a perfect analogy, because obviously people still hope for referrals from Google. But this idea that because something is published somewhere, it's okay, reminds me of Arthur Dent finding out that the notification about demolishing his house was in the third-subbasement of a local government building in a file cabinet marked "Beware of the Leopard." From rough memory; please forgive if I mis-remembered.

Do I get to bill google for all extra traffic I have to send by appending that to the body of my websites in order to prevent them from stealing my intellectual property?

Also going forward you have to add this to your site or I will steal anything that isn't nailed down.

I deliberately opted out of snippets for TLD List [0], a price comparison site I made for domain names.

I don't know if it's made any difference. Organic search traffic from them has slowly but steadily increased over the years.

Google now sometimes displays a snippet from my competitor's website for searches like "cheapest .io domain" [1]. The snippet seems pretty useless as it doesn't include any registrars' names/links (and my competitor's price info is quite outdated).

In these cases, since the snippet is the 1st thing users see in SERP, and doesn't provide enough info to fully answer the question, I'd wager that my competitor is ultimately receiving the majority of clicks from these snippets.

[0] https://tld-list.com

[1] https://i.imgur.com/aFoZbFw.png

>I deliberately opted out of snippets

Appreciate your datapoint. Also btw, when I "view source" the HTML of tld-list.com, I notice it has "nosnippet" inside a comment:

    <!--
    <meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet">
    -->

Does google crawler parse and obey "nosnippet" embedded in HTML comments?

No I don't think so. Thanks for pointing that out.

IIRC, I eventually removed nosnippet because it caused google to not display microdata in SERP (see the "$25.99 to $99.80" in the above screenshot) that were desirable for my traffic. I instead replaced nosnippet with:

``` <meta name="robots" content="noarchive"> ```

And this seemed to have the same effect as nosnippet, but with the added benefit of my microdata still being displayed in SERP.

Thus allowing your competitor to take your place

wanna take bets google then deranks you heavily?

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