Jan 24, 2020

You know that thing where you have a super idea and then you work on strategy and tactics for a client for a couple of days and then Google makes a change to the way the SERP works and you’re all like THAT.

After having ‘experiment with FAQ schema’ on my TO DO list for bloody ages, and Martha’s email starred and at the bottom of my inbox since June 2019, I found a cool use case scenario and set about making it happen.

Martha. I’ll get around to it. It’s just going to take a little while.

Scenario:

I have some pages that perform really well for informational search queries, and these pages often win the featured snippet for those queries. Organic traffic to the site via these pages rarely has e-commerce revenue attributed to them but they do drive other micro conversions, such as newsletter signups, clicks through to social media profiles, and clicks through to the various ‘money pages’ on the website.

These pages REALLY suit FAQ, in fact they’re packed with FAQ content. Adding FAQ schema to these pages allows me to also include a range of bone fide ‘informational transactional’ questions in the schema, these questions already appear on the page and link through to the related transactional pages. By adding FAQ schema I can link directly through to these transactional pages from the SERP itself, and I can tag up my schema so that I can measure the impact of this strategy. If it’s successful I can work out other use case scenarios. Sounds good, right?

WRONG

You read that? Danny is talking about DE-DUPLICATION. The URL won’t appear again in the SERP for that query. Apart from it might. For a bit. At the top of page 2, as Dr Pete tweeted. But that’s water under the bridge…

I only had my double whammy of FS and FAQ schema showing for a day before this kicked in. Bad timing or what?

It was pretty easy (for me, on this page, in this case) to have a quick re-jig of the page format in order to lose the featured snippet across a swathe of search queries, and instead to of the FS have my FAQ schema showing:

‘Un-optimising’ (de-optimising?) isn’t something I’d necessarily recommend, in this case it was a way for me to test the relative merit of appearing in the FS (and not having me FAQ schema show) and having the URL appear further down the SERP, with the FAQ schema showing.

There is lots of testing to do here. The loss of the double FAQ schema / FS whammy 👭 appears to be something that a few people are thinking about, mourning, and starting to measure in terms of impact…

We're about to find out. I have several clients I helped get FAQ visibility on big volume phrases in multiple industries. I want to see trends though, not "first day" data. #SEOChat
— Alan Bleiweiss (@AlanBleiweiss) January 23, 2020

No snippet and max snippet meta tags

I wanted to test both of these tags (more details of the tags if you’re unfamiliar with them on SEL) – just to see how they’d work out in terms of suppressing the featured snippet. Again, I wouldn’t recommend applying these willy nilly, you’ll need to consider your own situation on a page by page, search query by search query basis.

If you want to see where your page would rank organically if it weren’t the featured snippet then this is a cool way to do so (hat tip Aledya’s Crawling Monday vid)

No snippet tag

This was a bit too much of a broad sword. I added the no snippet tag to the page and I lost the FS, got my FAQ schema, but also lost my meta description snippet. This makes my SERP result look much less appealing (in my mind) and much less clickable:

Max snippet tag

I set the max snippet tag to a little more than the character count of the meta description, and this did the trick. My URL with the FAQ schema is showing here, along with the meta description snippet: