Google May 2020 Core Update – FAQs within SERPs NERFED

In a Twitter post earlier, the Google Search Liaison Twitter account announced that Google will be releasing a broad core algorithm update. Hours later, they announced that the update is now live and it will take a few weeks for it to roll out in all of their data centers.

Since the update will take a couple days to finish completely rolling out in Google’s data centers, it is tough determining the felt effects of it and it might take a week or more to gather some data related to the update. The past few days were pretty stable but we do expect to see some fluctuations in the next few days due to the update.

SEMrush Sensor

Volatility on SEMRush sensor has been pretty calm lately so you can’t infer much from that.

What has Google changed?

So the first thing I noticed this evening when I was checking some local SERPS was something I had grown kind of accustomed to seeing was missing: all the FAQ schema boxes attached to SERPS everyone’s been abusing are gone! Google nerfed FAQ schema!

OK but what is a nerf?

If you’re unaware – to “nerf” something means when developers reduce something’s ‘power’ or effectiveness within a video game. Often times this is to solve some problem in a video game (such as an ‘overpowered’ weapon/ability or super effective strategy), or to push the players in one direction or another (such as a new cosmetic/item/character).

Nerfs affect the ‘meta’ or prevailing strategy/characters/items used to win the game. In this way nerfs also give control to the developer of how the players play the game. i.e. nerfing a commonly used item to discourage the community from playing with it.

This originated wayback in the online gaming world of Ultima Online.

At one point in the game, the developers reduced the power of swords in melee combat.

This resulted in players complaining that it was like they were hitting each other with nerf bats, not swords.

From then on, if ever something gets made less worth while than it had been originally, it is considered ‘nerfed’

If you have been living under a rock these past few months, you might have missed everyone adding a list of FAQs and some FAQ schema markup to their pages which pretty consistently was rewarding you with a nice box of FAQs that showed up in the SERPS. This was a pretty dirty trick I shared a couple months ago that often times let you knock a competitor off the front page. For some niches it was getting pretty ridiculous,  seeing 2-3 different sites for the same query displaying all the FAQs was significantly lowering the amount of results shown.

It was pretty crazy how easy it was to knock someone off the front page – so I’m not surprised to see this get nerfed. From Google’s perspective, I’d guess they are dialing this back to improve the quality of search engine results pages.

How does this change affect us?

In our case, as SEO’s – how does this effect the meta? Well the silver lining is that I think this will actually lead to an improvement in CTR – sometimes implementing this schema would mean people would just get information from the FAQ dropdown and never even visit the site, i.e.  zero click searches. For those of us who do SEO for businesses that was hardly ever a good thing because we want to drive traffic to our site.

Personally I’m going to leave most of the FAQs on the pages where I put them because its a great way to beef up the amount of content on a page, and it’s also useful information for the visitors. #itwasgoodwhileitlasted

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source https://www.adinfusion.com/google-may-2020-core-update-faq-schema-nerfed/