[bctt tweet=” According to Google, you don’t have to include all of the FAQs on the page in the FAQ schema markup.“]
In a recent English Google SEO office-hours session held on January 14, 2022, Google’s John Mueller answered a question regarding FAQ Schema Markup. According to Google, not all FAQ questions and answers on the page need to be included in the FAQ Schema structured data.
The correct way of using FAQ Schemas
In the live session held on YouTube, the question raised was whether we needed to include all of the FAQs on the page in the FAQ schema.
Here’s the question asked:
“I have 15 to 20 FAQs on my web page. Should I include all the questions in the FAQ schema or just the questions that I consider important?”
In response to this question, Google’s John Mueller stated that it is not required to markup all of your website’s visible content. It’s perfectly acceptable with Google if you have a lot of FAQs on your website but only want to use the FAQ schema markup on the most important ones. One thing to keep in mind is that when you use the FAQ schema markup, the content of the FAQs must be visible to the users on the page. All of the content on your page that you believe should be highlighted to Google should be marked up using the appropriate schema markups.
Here’s John Mueller’s explanation:
“When it comes to structured data, we want to see the structured data visible on the page, but not all visible content has to be marked up with structured data.
So if you have individual pieces of content on your page that you want to give structured data for, then go ahead and do that. You don’t have to do that for every piece of content on your page.
So if you have 20 FAQs and you mark up five of them, that’s totally up to you.”
Why would you want to include only specific questions in the FAQ schema?
On Jun 18, 2021, Google’s Danny Sullivan confirmed that the FAQ snippet will only show a maximum of 2 questions per result on Google SERP. Prior to this, SEO professionals used to include all the FAQs in the FAQ schema markup in the hope of acquiring a larger FAQ snippet on the Google SERP. As a result, four FAQs were displayed in the SERP (4 questions and their answers in a drop-down). This allowed the website to take up more real estate on Google’s search engine results page (SERP) and potentially outperform its competitors.
However, with the new limit of two FAQs per result, it is important to carefully consider which questions and answers are the ones that will result in a good CTR. The SEO community was split on whether or not Google would penalize a website if all of the FAQs on the page were not included in the FAQ schema. Google’s John Mueller has now put all the speculations to rest by confirming that only the most important FAQs can be included in the FAQ schema markup. This presents you with an opportunity to identify the important FAQs that you want to rank for in the FAQ snippet and use the FAQ markup on them.
If you are on the fence on which FAQs will perform better on SERP, we advise you to markup all your FAQ questions and answers and let Google decide.
In the YouTube video below, you can watch the complete conversation on the FAQ Schema topic:
