Google has confirmed it will be reducing the amount of HowTo and FAQ-rich results shown in search results over the next week. You may be wondering what this means and how this may impact your website’s click through rates, which is what we’ll explain in this blog.
What is structured data?
Structure data is a piece of code that is added to your website, normally by an SEO plugin like Yoast or Rank Math on WordPress, that enables you to give search engines more details about the content on your site.
HowTo and FAQ-rich results are shown for some websites which have added structured data to their code to show these features in the search engine results page (SERPs). This can help with the click through rate to your website, as the result is more attractive to searchers.
However, Google has now decided that it will be reducing HowTo schema to desktop devices only, and that FAQ schema will only be shown for authoritative and well-known government and health websites.
To make sure that your HowTo schema can be picked up by search engines to be shown as a rich result in the SERPs, you need to make sure that the code is available on the mobile version of your website, as well as the desktop version of your site. This is because Google crawls your website as a mobile device. If the schema isn’t there on the mobile version of your site, then Google won’t be able to pick up this data.
Should you remove structured data from your website?
Google has confirmed that there is no need to remove the structured data from your website. According to the company:
“Structured data that’s not being used does not cause problems for Search, but also has no visible effects in Google Search.”
If you’re looking to increase your reach online through search engines, give the team at Engage Web a call to have a chat about how we can increase traffic to your website for search engines.
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- Mobile-first indexing: what is it, and why has it taken so long? - November 3, 2023
- Google updates structured data understanding - October 31, 2023