Google is drastically reducing the visibility of FAQ and How-To rich snippets.
After end of this week:
1/ FAQ = only for gov or health sites
2/ How-to = only on desktop
I have questions, like… why?
My thought: they take away too many clicks from Google’s SERP Features.
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Context: Past SEO experiments have shown heavy CTR increases when implementing FAQ/how-to schema.
Consequence: many sites will see lower click rates and less organic traffic. The winner? Google’s People Also Asked and knowledge cards.
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@Kevin_Indig
Or may be this
@Marie_Haynes
FAQs was definitely over used for not so unique question/answers pairs on pages across the web
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@Kevin_Indig
Potentially. But like a lot of rich-snippet surfacing schema elements (eg review markup), they were definitely abused by some marketers who just wanted the SERP visibility & would stuff them with irrelevant questions, etc.
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@Kevin_Indig
Google SGE is why. It will only get worse as time goes on. This will be the new normal as they shave more and more from publishers.
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@Kevin_Indig
too much seo spam... which leads to overexploitation...and I'm a seo... but just look at the degradation of the quality of content in favor of a list of undrinkable questions..
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@Kevin_Indig
The "cleaner and consistent" statement makes me lol. When I search for something I get 3 ads and soon probably also an AI answer that I need to scroll by. But they want me to believe they care about user experience ? 🤣
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@Kevin_Indig
I think it was heavily misused by SEOs. They copied questions from the PAA section and reproduced similar answers, mimicking what PAA offers. Additionally, these types of FAQs didn't offer much value to users; they only added to the clutter.
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@Kevin_Indig
I suspect it wasn’t at anytime useful for users, only to Google as training material. Now it’s limiting it to the most trusted sources
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@VorticonCmdr
I saw strong CTR increases from it. Plus, it’s been live for a long time. Surprised Google takes it down now.
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@Kevin_Indig
I’m just happy to see there’s another SEO out there who’s listening to Redman while thinking about this stuff.
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@pandson
Yeah I'm a Riddler, you can't see me
If I was "Avatar" in 3D
Hit the T-O-P, it's easy
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@Kevin_Indig
Now that everyone has structured them in a way that they can train their Ai on them they don’t need them.. these will now display in sge instead no doubt…
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