Hi,
Thanks for contacting Yoast Support.
Can you confirm you are using the latest versions of WordPress 5.5.1 and Yoast SEO for WordPress 14.9? Also, would it be possible for you to check if you can recreate this issue with a default WordPress theme such as TwentyTwenty and only the Yoast SEO plugin? And then if you use the default WordPress block editor and add a FAQ structured data block, do you still get the same result in the Rich Results tool that it detects information for a carousel?
Hi, yes i can confirm that. Also tried with twentytwenty and its the same…
It does not seem to be related to the themes as even your example page: https://yoast.com/yoast-diversity-fund/apply/
google detected information for carrousels.
Hi there,
The short answer (and the good news) is that this isn’t a problem. Your FAQ markup is correct and will work correctly. Providing there aren’t any other problems, your FAQ content should be eligible to show up as FAQ results in Google.
The longer version (and the bad news) is, Google’s specification for how they handle FAQs, and how they handle “carousel” markup, are both… problematic.
There are a few moving parts, so please bear with me as a ramble…
- It’s good practice to use
itemList
schema markup when you want to describe a list of things. In most cases, FAQ questions are a type of ‘list’, so it makes sense to describe them this way. We define a list, and we place each question inside of it. Without this approach, the questions are… ‘orphaned’ in the page.
- However, whenever you define an
itemList
on a page, Google incorrectly assumes that you’re trying to be eligible for ‘carousel’ results (a concept which Google have invented, which doesn’t exist in schema.org).
- Conversely, there’s no precise approach in schema.org to say “This is a list of questions”, only, “this is a list, and, it contains questions”. Which brings me onto the next issue…
- Google’s specification handles this omission by requiring questions to be directly attached to the WebPage schema piece as the ‘main entity’ of the page. That causes a heap of technical and conceptual problems which I won’t get into in too much depth (you can’t conceptually have multiple main entities, and you certainly can’t have multiple types of main entities). Suffice to say, Google’s approach doesn’t work well in the real world, with the kinds of more complex and interconnected schema that we output.
So, to summarise:
- Our FAQ structured data doesn’t quite align with Google’s documented approach, but, it works, it’s more sensible, and it’s more sophisticated + robust.
- Google’s testing tools are a bit trigger-happy about carousel markup.
- Everything is fine.
We are going ahead and marking this issue as resolved due to inactivity. If you require any further assistance please create a new issue.