FAQ

Introduction #

FAQ Schema is a structured data markup format that enables you to provide organized and easily accessible Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on your webpages. Properly marked up FAQ pages may be eligible to have a rich result on Search and an Action on the Google Assistant, which can help your site reach the right users.

Guidelines #

• Only use FAQ schema if your page contains FAQs where there’s a single answer to each question. If your page has a single question and users can submit alternative answers, use QA schema (coming soon) instead.
• Don’t use FAQ schema for advertising purposes.
• Make sure each Question includes the entire text of the question and make sure each Answer includes the entire text of the answer.
• Question and answer content may not be displayed as a rich result if it contains any of the following types of content: obscene, profane, sexually explicit, graphically violent, promotion of dangerous or illegal activities, or hateful or harassing language.
• All FAQ content must be visible to the user on the source page.
• If you have FAQ content that is repetitive on your site (meaning, the same question and answer appear on multiple pages on your site), mark up only one instance of that FAQ for your entire site.

Usage #

You should do the following steps in order to markup a FAQ :

1. Go to the Items section.
2. Select FAQ from the item type dropdown and click on the + icon next to it to add a FAQ schema form.
3. On the show on page field, select the page which the FAQ exists. You can select more than one pages but this is not recommended (see guidelines).
4. Now you can either add your questions & answers manually or you can click on the Get faq from page content button to populate the fields automatically from your content.

Get faq from page content #

This button lets you populate your questions & answers with text from your content. To use it you must first assign your FAQ schema to one or more pages, using the show on page field. If your FAQ is assigned to more than one pages, when you click on the Get faq from page content button, you must first select a page. If there is only one page assigned, you go directly to the next step which is selecting a FAQ structure from your content.

Actus Deep Schema can recognize FAQ structures from several plugins. If any of them is present on your page, you get an option to select it. Clicking on an existing FAQ structure, populates the Frequently Asked Questions field with your questions and answers.

There is also a custom selection option. Clicking on it you can manually select a FAQ structure. You should define the CSS selectors for the elements you desire. Let’s assume that there is a FAQ on your page that has the following structure:

<div id="example-faq">
    <div class="row-1">
        <div class="question-text">Question 1 text</div>
        <div class="answer-text">Answer 1 text</div>
    </div>
    <div class="row-2">
        <div class="question-text">Question 1 text</div>
        <div class="answer-text">Answer 1 text</div>
    </div>
</div>

In this case you should enter #example-faq in the FAQ parent field, .question-text in the questions field and .answer-text in the answers field. When you hit OK, the Frequently Asked Questions field will be populated with your questions and answers.

The FAQ parent field must indicate the element that is the parent of the question rows. So, if your structure has a container for these rows like in the example below, then the container’s selector must go in the FAQ parent field (.example-faq-container).

You can use any kind of CSS selectors. If for example your container doesn’t have any class or id, you could indicate it like that: #example-faq > div

<div id="example-faq">
    <div class="example-faq-container">
        <div class="row-1">
            <div class="question-text">Question 1 text</div>
            <div class="answer-text">Answer 1 text</div>
        </div>
        <div class="row-2">
            <div class="question-text">Question 1 text</div>
            <div class="answer-text">Answer 1 text</div>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

Behind the scenes #

A FAQ schema is not really a schema type itself. It is an array of objects that must be assigned on the mainEntity property of a Webpage schema and the Webpage schema must have the FAQPage type. Actus Deep Schema does all the required connections to serve a properly formatted schema. You only need to fill your FAQ schema form.

Details for the FAQ Schema #