Mueller Explains Why Google Might Show Less FAQ Rich Results

Mueller Explains why Google Might Show Less FAQ Rich Results

A Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) page contains a list of questions and answers that address a specific topic.

As the name implies, the page consists of a list of questions that users type into the query box. In turn, Google surfaces answers from publishers with properly marked up FAQ pages.

FAQ rich results are available in all countries and languages that have access to Google Search. Also, the feature is available on both desktop and mobile.

Google Stopped Showing FAQ Pages

In a recent Google Webmaster Central hangout, a publisher raised an issue about missing FAQ pages.

At first, the site owners thought something was wrong with their website. So, they tested the URLs in Google Search Console and the Google Rich Results tester tool.

These Google tools showed that there was nothing wrong with the website’s schema implementation. Yet, the FAQ rich results seem to be gone from the SERP for good.

Finally, the publisher wrote John Mueller to know what went wrong. They wanted to understand why Google was no longer showing the FAQ rich results on the search engine result page.

John Mueller declined to offer an explanation that’s specific to that publisher. Instead, he provided a general statement on why FAQ pages go missing in the SERPs.

Why Google Might Show Less FAQ Rich Results

According to Mueller, the number of FAQ markup pages is so much that Google can’t automatically show them.

FAQ rich results tend to reduce the number of pages shown on the search result page. So, it makes sense that Google might want to control the number of FAQ pages to avoid a negative impact on user experience.

Mueller noted:

“It’s really more that suddenly everyone has added FAQ markup to their pages, and we can’t show every search result with FAQ markup. So we have to kind of fine-tune which ones, which queries, which pages we would be showing the FAQ rich results type for.”

The Google advocate also pointed out that adding the required structured data for a rich result doesn’t entitle a page to a rich result. This is especially true for the FAQ pages.