What’s Happening with Google Featured Snippet Images

Based on reports today, Google will drop your organic listing when your content is displayed in the featured snippet at the top of the page. Damn Google, why you always have to bash on us SEO’s? But more important, get your act together with the content that is displayed in these featured snippets!

These featured snippets sometimes are showing images right next to the content. However, I’ve seen cases where the images are pulled from a completely different site than from the website the featured snippet is from. Let me show you what I mean.

Featured Snippet with an image

Here are two examples of featured snippets from the WeAreFanatics blog. The first one is showing the image of the post that is is being featured, no harm done here!

The image of the Boston Red Sox jersey evolution blogpost was matching with the content in the featured snippet. Bit what happens if the image is from another website?

Mismatch of image & content source in featured snippet

I bet having an image in a featured snippet will increase the click through rate on the link in it, but what happens if the image is from another site. Does Google do this? Yup!

Here is an example where an image was pulled from a different site to be featured right next to the content of the Seahawks jersey evolution post on the WeAreFanatics blog.

I would think this is because there are no images of this blogpost that are ranking in Google image search, hence chooses to display an image from a different site, but this is not the case, as there are multiple images ranking from this post:

Having an image featured from a different website right next to the content we publish can become problematic because I don’t have control over what is in this image. Users might think I’m responsible for that image. In the case of an offensive image, this can really effect the way people look at the brand I’m working for.

So, please Google, before you start testing to take out the organic result for websites that are shown in your featured snippets, get your act together in the way these snippets are displayed!