• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 4, 2020

Google has been working to highlight webpage content from a click on a featured snippet in the Google search results on desktop and mobile.

The company says the feature is now live. “As we have done with AMP pages since December 2018, clicking on a featured snippet now takes users to the exact text highlighted for HTML pages, when we can confidently determine where the text is, for browsers that support the underlying technology….” tweeted Google SearchLiaison.

Featured snippets are boxes where the format of regular listings is reversed, showing the descriptive piece of text first. Webmasters do not need to add any markup language. It occurs automatically, using Scroll To Text for HTML pages, Google tweeted. 

The snippet will change marketing by allowing marketers to link to a specific portion of text on a page on their website, using a snippet provided in the URL. When the page is loaded, the browser highlights the text and scrolls it into view, directing those searching to specific copy the first time without the user having to do multiple searches or scans through the page. 

Previously it was just for AMP pages, but now Google is offering the feature for HTML pages.

The feature doesn’t always work, however. “Interesting you should post this now, I think I just noticed this happening,” @jacobseated tweeted, continuing: “but then the highlight disappeared after consenting to cookies - the hashtag was still in the URL though.”

It seems to work well in the Google Chrome browser, but people have had issues getting it to work in others.