{"id":63424,"date":"2023-10-04T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-04T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net\/?p=63424"},"modified":"2023-09-29T12:31:07","modified_gmt":"2023-09-29T19:31:07","slug":"study-google-update-decreases-search-result-faqs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net\/blog\/content\/study-google-update-decreases-search-result-faqs.htm","title":{"rendered":"Study: Google Update Decreases Search Result FAQs By 37%"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In May 2019, Google announced FAQ structured data, drastically changing the SERP landscape. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within days, SEO experts tried to push the feature as far as possible. Some people were jubilant with their findings, and others were fraught with dismay, but everyone was curious. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, Google’s approach to FAQs in search has evolved into a straightforward feature, and the fervor has vanished. While a few companies performed tests to see how much an FAQ snippet affects organic traffic, like Semrush’s split tests<\/a>, we haven’t seen studies about how FAQs work as a SERP feature and the parameters within which they function.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, digital marketers have wandered through a dark cave chasing after FAQs for years without truly understanding their nature. We’ve stubbed our toes, sprinted face-first into dead ends, and slipped on guano too many times. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, Portent’s SEO Fellow Matthew Henry<\/a>, former SEO Architect Evan Hall<\/a>, and I ignited torches and embarked on a journey to map this cave and track down FAQs in their natural habitat: search results. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In February, we used Portent’s proprietary crawler RainGage<\/a> to crawl 313,160 pages in Google search results, which provided 85,572 unique URLs. We also scraped text and markup data from each page within the results. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In March, we scoured the results and came to some surprising conclusions, but then we tripped over an unexpected vine while writing the report and stumbled to a halt because, in April, Google made unannounced changes that significantly affected how often FAQ results appear<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Suddenly, our brand-new data was outdated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While we waited to see if FAQ volatility settled, Google officially announced its FAQ rollback<\/a> on August 8, 2023, saying, “FAQ 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.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After this announcement, we re-ran our crawl on August 15 and discovered that 82.96 percent<\/strong> of websites with FAQ schema no longer earn FAQ results, compared to 46.06 percent <\/strong>in February. The number of FAQs shown in SERPs has also decreased from 53.94 percent to 17.04 percent<\/strong>. We have a lot more data to dive into. Keep reading to nerd out about the study background and our analysis method. You can also jump straight to the study results<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Study Background<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

FAQs are a bit nebulous. You add schema markup to the page; voila, your search result has two FAQ results. Or the FAQ isn’t there, and you’re not sure why not. Sometimes, Google even adds an FAQ for content you didn’t markup, creating more confusion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We sought to determine if Google has an obvious method to its madness and if we can develop guidelines around those methods to ensure FAQs appear more consistently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We looked into the following questions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n