Google’s John Mueller responded to a question about a site that lost its rich results display and wanted to know why Google removed them and if the rich results would ever be restored.
The question was posed at the 52:26 mark of the Google After-hours hangout.
However, because it was a two-part question, the answer to the second part was not given until after John had finished answering the first part. So, three minutes later, at the 55:19 minute mark, comes the answer.
Rich Results Removed Following Site Redesign There have been numerous anecdotal reports of site redesigns that go horribly wrong, go extremely well, or end up neutral with no change in rankings.
Rich Results Removed After Site Redesign
They tested their schema markup to see if there was a technical issue, but it passed all of the tests.
It’s difficult to fix something when you don’t know what’s wrong, so the person asking the question simply wants to know where they should go with this.
This is the question, part two of a two-part question:
“Another customer they just redesigned their website. It’s still the same CMS and content.
And after that, all of our FAQ schemas stopped being displayed in Google Search results.
And this is three months old now and we still are not there., even everything being passing on the rich results test and inspection tool.
Why did that happen and when should I expect to see FAQ being displayed again or if it will ever be?”
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The loss of rich results could be coincidental
John Mueller responded to the question, implying at one point that changes to the site may not have resulted in the loss of rich results.
However, he also mentions re-evaluating the site’s quality.
John Mueller answered:
“I think there are two things that might have happened… It’s hard to say offhand.
One is that we might have re-evaluated the quality of your website overall at about the same time that you made those changes.
It’s probably more of a coincidence if that were the case.
But it could be that we kind of like are not that convinced about this website anymore.
And if we’re not convinced about the website, then usually we don’t show any rich results. And that would include the FAQs.”
Quality Check for John Mueller’s Rich Results
Next, John suggested a method to determine whether the lack of rich results is due to a technical issue or because Google is “not convinced” of the site.
Mueller went on:
“So one way to kind of double-check that is if you do a site query for these individual pages, do the rich results show up there or not?
If they do show up there then that means technically we can recognize them but we don’t want to show them.
So that’s kind of a hint that maybe from a quality point of view you need to improve things.
If they don’t show up with a site query then that means more that there’s still something technical which is broken with regards to that.”
There is no set period of time after a redesign
If everything else remains the same after a site is redesigned, Google will generally crawl it as usual, and there should be no disruption, as the old site is gradually replaced in Google’s index by the new site.
Mueller concluded his response:
“So it’s not that there is a fixed delay, after restructuring of a website, for us to start showing them again.
It’s more like… maybe there was coincidentally weird timing or maybe there’s a technical issue.”
Mueller cautioned that the site query test he suggested is not completely reliable.
He said:
“Yeah, it’s not 100% perfect. But it works for a lot of these cases when it comes to rich results.”
The Site Query Exploit
A site query is a search similar to this:
site:example.com Example Keywords
A site query does not make use of Google’s standard ranking algorithm. It’s unclear what it uses, but it’s clear that it’s not the same as a regular search query, as are all of the advanced search queries. It’s simply a search of a single website.
It’s not every day that Mueller provides a simple way to determine what’s wrong with a website. He did, however, state that it is not 100 percent.
The key takeaway is that poor site quality may be the reason why rich results do not appear on Google. It might be interesting to see if the rich results appear on Bing, as Bing has rich results as well.
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