Google began testing “People Also Ask” last week, however at the time it seemed to only display for non-commercial queries.
In this case, a search for “payday loans”, a high value keyword phrase – and one that sees quite a bit of spam – is displaying a “People also ask” box in the Google search results.
SEOs tend to get a bit squeamish whenever they see answer boxes showing up in a highly competitive search query – unless it happens to be the themselves in one of these answer boxes. But it can be a lot harder to compete when a competitor’s site gets highlighted, as many people feel it is unfair that commercial sites show up in answer box results, especially for commercial search terms.
This isn’t the first time that Google is displaying things such as answer boxes for highly competitive keyword phrases – and ones that tend to be heavily spammed. We spotted an answer box showing up for “cheap home insurance” that displayed a commercial result in the box.
H/T to Dan Barker who spotted the commercial “People also ask” boxes.
Jennifer Slegg
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