Google has added a new feature to the search results, marking a best answer in the search results when displaying a result from a Q&A type of webpage with possible answers.
The example comes from StackOverflow and was shared by Alexis Sanders on Twitter.
In addition to highlighting the best answer, it also includes information on how many people voted for each answer. Google includes a snippet for each answer, and it also appears to be utilizing a carousel format as well.
As Sanders points out, the page is using schema.org/QAPage , schema.org/Question schema.org/Answer to mark up the page, which Google is then using in the search results to pull out the relevant information for the best answer.
Gary Illyes from Google said late last year that site owners should focus on schema and that Google planned to expand search features using schema, and this example definitely falls into that.
If you have any kind of site that has Q&As where readers can vote on the best answer, it is probably worth adding this schema to the relevant pages. Not only can this help Google for search features such as the above, it also helps Google understand pages to index and rank them better. This does appear to be a test at this time, as I was not able to replicate it, but since this offers a pretty high user experience, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this one expand to all users.
Jennifer Slegg
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