Cadence #25 - Evolving past FAQs

Hey everyone! This week I'm sharing some thoughts on the FAQ-ageddon as the newsletter is one subscriber away from 1,400! Thank you for all your support.

FAQs

The past week Google revealed they are going to be showing FAQ and HowTo Rich Results less and less in the coming days/weeks as part of a global rollout.

This should be finished rolling out by Tuesday (15th), according to Google's blog which also outlined a "reason" as to why they are making this change:

To provide a cleaner and more consistent search experience, we're changing how some rich results types are shown in Google's search results. In particular, we're reducing the visibility of FAQ rich results, and limiting How-To rich results to desktop devices. This change should finish rolling out globally within the next week.

For me, this translates as two things:

1. Y'all over-done it and spammed this schema to hell and conflated the beneficial purpose of webpages with FAQ inclusions it's just become a quagmire of meh.
2. This SERP feature isn't overly compatible with Search Generative Experience.

Google could fix the FAQ SEO overdoing-it-spam problem. But what would be the return? None.

Especially now Google is promising future $$$ from its AI products, so it wouldn't make sense to do this - especially with the almost conversational functions of SGE and Bard.

So why is this a spam problem?

In SEO a lot of people are just searching for the next silver bullet, and Schema has become somewhat of a misunderstood implementation - by this I mean:

• Not everything requires Schema.
• Just because a Schema exists on Schema.org doesn't mean Google cares or makes use of it.
• Broken schema or unsupported schema isn't a penalty.
• Removing schema that's no longer supported isn't a priority.

And then there is the whole other confusion of "Semantic Web Technologies", with people thinking this is the same as lexical semantics... (Now I have a topic for next week's newsletter!)

This overuse isn't just the schema code, it's then the inclusion of text on a webpage, and shoe-horning FAQs onto almost every page is not helpful. I've heard it described wrongly as "semantic SEO", and as general content marketing.

In most cases, it makes it harder for Google to determine two things:

• The beneficial purpose of the page
• The main content of the page

And if Google isn't able to determine this clearly, it can create issues with ranking (like a glass ceiling).

Another key piece of information Google included in the same blog is this:

Going forward,?FAQ?(from?FAQPage?structured data) rich results will only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. For all other sites, this rich result will no longer be shown regularly. Sites may automatically be considered for this treatment depending on their eligibility.

A strong nod to EEAT (the most popular concept taken from the QRGs) - but mainly a strong reinforcement of different treatment and ranking/SERP feature thresholds for different source types.

What do I need to do now?

In the short term, there will be a decrease in clicks and impressions in GSC and third-party tools as Google begins to remove these results from the SERPs.

There's nothing to mitigate here, other than to understand and communicate the changes effectively and clearly to other non-SEO stakeholders within the business.

For some, this also likely means more difficult conversations as to why you're not as reputable a medical website as someone like WebMD (and it's not just links), so good luck with that.

It will also likely require roadmap changes and communicating strategy change, as this tactic has been taken off the table.

In the long term, the removal of this feature for me further reinforces the need to evolve strategy further from being SEO - to SAO.