Google Removed HowTo and FAQ Schema Markup from Rich Results [Video]
Google completely removed the HowTo and FAQ from the rich search results. Should you still add their schema markup to your website? Since I haven’t found clear Google’s answer, here is an opinion: Why not?
So, no more fancy ‘How to’ and ‘FAQ’ rich snippets in the Google search for ordinary sites. Google no longer shows the HowTo and FAQ the rich results.
It’s in case you didn’t know it.
Because I didn’t. Although it happened back in 2023.
Are you running websites and doing SEO?
Hello there, me too.
If you landed here to understand what happened to the HowTo and FAQ schema markups, don’t worry. I will explain it as simply as I can.
Here I will talk about
- Changes to HowTo and FAQ Schema Markup
You can watch my video on this subject on YouTube:
I didn’t know about it because despite of years of doing SEO for my sites, I never implemented the schema markup on them. I kept putting it off until later.
This later happened recently.
I started updating some of the pages on different sites and what a surprise it was, when I was diving deeper in the tutorials for HowTo and FAQ, to find out that Google is deprecating this option since 2023.
Here is what Google says:
Changes to HowTo and FAQ rich results
[…] we’re extending the How-to change to desktop as well. As of September 13 [2023], Google Search no longer shows How-to rich results on desktop, which means this result type is now deprecated.
[…] 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.
Why Google Did it?
Again, quote:
To provide a cleaner and more consistent search experience, we’re changing how some rich results types are shown in Google’s search results.
Does It affect all sites?
Quote:
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.
I made a short search and found at least one FAQ rich result for a government website.
And, yes, I confirm, they have FAQ schema markup.
Should sites remove FAQ and HowTo markup?
Quote:
While you can drop this structured data from your site, there’s no need to proactively remove it. Structured data that’s not being used does not cause problems for Search, but also has no visible effects in Google Search.
Does this Google’s change affect the ranking results?
Quote:
This should not be considered a ranking change and won’t be listed in the Search status dashboard.
Yes, every SEO expert can write 4000 words article about this “should” in every Google’s statement related to SEO.
To add or not to add the HowTo and FAQ markup?
Well.
It’s up to you.
If it doesn’t harm, why not add with little hope it still may help. At least, Google’s Rich Result Test Tool indicates the markup. I checked on my site:
People in the Google community are of the same opinion.
Since the Yoast SEO plugin makes it easy to implement, I will keep adding the HowTo and FAQ markup randomly.
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