The volatile journey of these snippets continues as we’ve seen FAQ and How-tos creep back onto the SERPs… but not exactly in the way Google promised they would.
Back in July we reported something we’d noticed in the SERPs — that FAQs were slowly, quietly, fading into the night. This didn’t seem too surprising as they had long been criticized as overly open to abuse and manipulation, but at the time, Google hadn’t mentioned anything officially on their departure from the SERPs.
FAQs chart from our July 2023 study
A look back at the diminishing number of FAQs per SERP by vertical from our previous study.
Then, on August 8, 2023 Google announced that this was indeed intentional — FAQs would now only show for authoritative domains, and at the same time, they were also removing How-to rich results from smartphone SERPs. At first, though, both of these announcements seemed to be contradicted by reality, in different ways.
Let’s take a look at FAQs first — these were supposed to become far harder to obtain. However, we documented results showing that, despite Google’s promise of a fast rollout, FAQs were just as prevalent in the top 10 as they had been all along, and only lower ranked FAQs had suffered.
As you can see in the chart below, the share of voice for this feature remained within normal ranges after the rollout due to those resilient top 10 appearances.
FAQ & How-to share of voice chart from our August 2023 post
Share of voice on desktop in the US remained well within the usual range immediately following Google’s announcement on August 8, 2023.
How-to was supposed to be disappearing from smartphone, but in another contradiction to Google’s announcement, their disappearance from lower ranked results was just as precipitous on desktop as smartphone in the US.
A look at How-to rich result counts
Our initial data from early August 2023 showed big drops in How-to result counts for US-en desktop, not just the smartphone SERPs that Google had indicated.
Another month later, Google (quietly) almost erased both features entirely, reducing them to single digit counts in our 40,000 SERP MozCast sample.
The demise of FAQ & How-to rich results in September 2023
We saw the prevalence of both rich result types drop to nearly zero in September 2023.
We thought that’d be the end of them. Imagine our surprise, when we peeked into the MozCast STAT dashboard at the start of December and found these green shoots.
The return of FAQ & How-to rich results
Like twin phoenixes from the ashes, we saw FAQ & How-to results rise again after several months absence from the SERPs.
So, what is going on? Is Google finally doing what it said it was going to do? Well, a bit, yes.
FAQs
The announcement from Google said that FAQs were now going to “only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites.” Initially, that is not what they actually did. However, at some point in November, that changed.
FAQs returned looking quite different from before
A closer look at the domains surfacing FAQ results showed a far greater leaning towards favoring .gov domains, as promised by Google.
Although the actual number of FAQ results is way down from historical levels, they are now coming from .gov domains 21% of the time. (We’re including .gov.uk in that measure, as this is a 50% GB-en keyword sample.)
In fact, the total count of .gov FAQ results has almost completely recovered to where it was before the drops this year.
Good news for .gov domains on the FAQ front
And just like that, the number of FAQ results on .gov domains climbed back to historic levels by November 30th, 2023.
Google also used the word “authoritative,” which, as part of Moz, we have a view on, of course.
A look at the average DA of FAQ results
We noticed a definite jump in the average DA of FAQ results with their resurgence on November 30th, which is in line with Google’s announcement to favor authoritative sites.
As the chart above shows, the average Domain Authority (a Moz metric that predicts a website’s likelihood to rank on the SERPs) of websites surfacing FAQ results shot up when they were reinstated in late November.
So it seems like FAQ results are now doing what Google said they were going to do initially. But what about How-tos?
How-to
The prescription for How-to was that it was to become a desktop-only result type.
How-to results are back on the scene
We noticed How-tos creeping back onto the SERPs in November 2023, and not just on desktop devices as Google initially claimed would be the case.
Google didn’t get their own memo on this, and the resurgence we’re seeing is small, but similarly prevalent on both mobile and desktop device types. We also don’t see any major outliers in the DA or .gov makeup of these results (unlike FAQs), and the average rank of a How-to result is about where it was before, too.
So, when it comes to Google’s announcement, it seems they did eventually do half of what they said they would — just not this bit.
Implications for SEOs
For now, this is mostly a curiosity, and a tale of Google having less than accurate public communications, or perhaps needing some time before the reality of search results reflect their announcements.
But whether the return of these rich result types was exactly as announced or not, the fact remains that FAQs and How-to snippets both remain as much diminished opportunities for SEOs on the vast majority of sites, not commanding nearly the same prominence or prevalence on the SERPs as their former incarnations.
