Understanding Q&A Content and Search
In order to most effectively answer questions for Google Question Hub, you should understand how Google specifically looks at Q&A content. Google recognizes and reads Q&A content a little bit different than article content, since there are ways that you can identify specific attributes related to Questions and Answers. How website tell Google what those attributes are is through tagging specific elements within Q&A content as being the question, answer (or answers), and then even if the answer has been recognized as a quality answer or note. Google recognizes this by sites marking their Q&A pages up using the methods recognized on Schema.org for Q&A Content.
If done well, your content will be eligible for Google’s Q&A rich results so that Google can recognize the question, specific answers, and the quality of those answers. You can test your content through Google’s Rich Results Test and if you’ve appropriately marked up your content you’ll see this message after your test:
If you click on the “Preview Results” option you’ll see how Google will display the page in their rich results:
Tools like Answerbase allow you to just post the question and answer through their admin portal, and then Answerbase automatically publishes each of those threads with the proper Schema.org markup which Google can then easily read and identify as Q&A content with all the appropriate tagging.
Is the Q&A Schema Required to Create Value?
Using the Q&A Schema isn’t strictly required in order to effectively answer questions through Google Question Hub or even get your basic rich results on Google. You’ll see that even blog posts are many times titled in the form of a question, and Google has gotten pretty good at picking up what content is going to answer the question for the user and featuring that answer. See an example of an product question and answer result of an Answerbase customer here:
You’ll see that even the normal featured snippets can be pretty rich, as Google recognizes the relevancy of the product image and the relationship of the product to the question being posted….so you can get great performance if your creating great content and have it appropriately marked up. Google will even recognize what the specific answer is to a query similar to what you see with another Answerbase customer here:
Google’s goal is to get answers to the queries they’re being asked and as you can see from the above examples they’re doing a great job if you’re using the appropriate tools and markup in order to distribute and publish the answers, but the more information you give to Google the better they’ll be able to accomplish the goal. If you have a question and answer combination, let Google know that through the structured data on the page and then let them do their magic from there in ensuring the format of the results will best service the end customer. If you have the structured data identified in the markup, it’ll give them what they need to ensure the end users are getting the best result based on the inquiry.
How to Post Answers to Google Question Hub?
Google Question Hub’s tools don’t specifically require that you have Q&A markup on your pages as mentioned above, they just require that you identify the URL of the content that should answer the question. So, for example, if you create a Q&A page through Answerbase you can take that URL and let Google know that is where the Answer is. When you’re viewing the questions that have been posted, you’ll see an option to answer the question as seen here:
The field that you’re presented with simply allows you to identify the URL of the content that has the answer to the question. Google Question Hub just looks at your content as a suggested answer for the inquiry which they’ve identified doesn’t have sufficient content for what they would consider a good result, it doesn’t mean that your result is necessarily going to be selected as the most relevant result, doesn’t mean that your result will be featured, etc. That is why it’s still necessary to ensure that you publish content on pages that Google can recognize as being very relevant for the question that was asked and put yourself in the best position to get those top spots.