Last night, I confirmed with Google on Search Engine Land that the FAQs, Q&A and How-To snippets posted on Twitter from Akhil Agarwal while at the Google Dance Singapore event was indeed coming to a search result snippet near you. Google confirmed this is being tested and falls within the bucket of the best answer carousel we've been seeing for some time.
Here is the screen shot @akhil1594 share with me, you can click to enlarge it:
Now, I love how Aaron Bradley on Google+ marked up (see what I did there?) the photo with the appropriate schema that powers it. He said when he posted it that these "will probably be fueled by structured data" and he was right.
- The FAQ snippet is powered by FAQPage schema
- The Q&A snippet is powered by QAPage schema
- The How-To snippet is powered by HowTo schema
A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land:
We’re always looking for new ways to provide the most relevant, useful results for our users. We’ve recently introduced new ways to help users understand whether responses on a given Q&A or forum site could have the best answer for their question. By bringing a preview of these answers onto Search, we’re helping our users more quickly identify which source is most likely to have the information they’re looking for. We’re currently working with partners to experiment with ways to surface similar previews for FAQ and How-to content.
Google should be opening an interest form for publishers interesting in joining this beta in the upcoming weeks - so stay tuned for that link. In the mean time, you can go ahead and markup relevant content with that schema, if you'd like to get a head start.
