Yesterday Google announced, via X, that the FAQ and HowTo rich results feature has had its visibility reduced. It has been reduced significantly with this change.
The Decline of FAQ Schema
This was likely to happen given FAQ and HowTo rich data results have been one of the most used SEO techniques for gaining more SERP real estate. This SEO agency ensured all our SEO clients made the most of the FAQ schema, where it made sense to ensure they capitalised on already high search positions. Some SEO consultants have been caught abusing the rich snippet by stuffing it with any question/answer just to grab more pixels on the SERPs.
Coming into 2023, though, we and many others in the SEO industry notice a decline in FAQ rich results. Us SEOs can never have something nice for long, it seems.
John Mueller from Google has explained that this will roll out globally over the next week.
This change will affect most websites but will remain supported for “well-known, authoritative government and health websites“. At Teckle Digital, a few of our SEO and digital/content marketing clients fall into these categories, so time will tell if these rich results stay active.
Documentation from the Google Search Central blog can be found here.
What Next?
I won’t go back to previous content just to remove FAQ schema, but in the future, I am now a lot less likely to add FAQ Schema to a page. With that in mind, we will still be providing Q&A sections on websites, blogs and web content for clients – we will skip the FAQ Schema unless we know the website falls into the category of “well-known, authoritative government and health websites“.
For those looking for a new website or designing a new one, my advice would be to forget about supporting FAQ or HowTo rich results for now. If things change in the future, then you can always add support at a later date. We have already removed this requirement from the company SEO checklist for our web design services.
If you need an SEO agency that keeps up to date as we do, please get in touch with us today. We offer FREE consultations from our Edinburgh city centre office.