Answer
Feb 14, 2025 - 12:42 PM
Answerbase has always seen that Q&A content has grown over time as customers post more helpful content to their customers, fulfilling the customer demand for information within helpful answers. I fact, we've never really seen a downturn in organic traffic to the Q&A knowledge bases over the 17 years we've been serving customers through Q&A knowledge bases. The last 12 months have been particularly interesting though....because ever since Google incorporated their Helpful Content System into their core ranking systems.....we started to see a rise in the activity to the Q&A landing pages and then a couple explosions in activity over the August core update and now a similar rise after Google's December core update. The most notable was in the August update...which we actually saw hit specifically on July 18th and has sustained since. See example here of this seasonal business that has their peaks in the summer months and then tapers off into the winter until their next summer....but look at what happened July 18th to their Q&A knowledge base:
At this stage the Q&A knowledge base is responsible for over 45% of that merchant's organic traffic...and as the Q&A knowledge base has increased in value...it's had a clear impact on how the rest of their site (mostly product and category pages) has performed.
Well....we've seen a similar lift in the December update now....starting to see this around December 3rd where there was a notable lift in impressions and then clicks start following a few weeks after. The above example was an established SMB ecommerce merchant who has been answering questions well for awhile......but see this example of a new customer who started their Q&A knowledge base around March, their Q&A knowledge base has grown significantly since launch and you can see specific lifts to the content in Google's August Core Update and Google's December Core Update. See here:
That is over 500K organic visitors within the first 12 months of launching the Q&A knowledge base on their site. You can see the lift after July 18th.....and then a similar notable lift after Dec 3rd.....which continues to grow.
For existing customers....similar to the March update....where we saw customer's Q&A knowledge base go from a relatively low percentage of their overall search volume to a significant percentage....we saw the same thing in December. It seems like Google is making some kind of determination through these updates that these sections of the site are "helpful" and rewarding them. See this customer who went from the Q&A knowledge base being only about 2% of their organic traffic to 20% of their organic traffic.
And now we're seeing something similar in December's core update...where this customer's Q&A goes form about the same 2% to over 13% of their organic traffic now:
We've seen this with big sites, tiny sites, and just as our cloud infrastructure needed to scale notably after the August core update.....we've seen similar activity in the December core update to keep up with the demand for the information.
As we continue to dig into the data and look to get access to more and more of our customer's Google Search Console accounts....in order to get a full picture of what Google is reporting back related to this increased activity.....we think the more general experience is that we saw a slow and moderate increase in traffic to the Q&A knowledge bases since Google incoporated the helpful content system into their core ranking systems.....and then a huge a notable lift in August which reached a plateau....and now another lift after the December Core update and it is finding it's new plateau spot after. See here which would be our general impression of what is going on based on the data we're seeing this may be the accurate view of the overall activity that Q&A knowledge bases have experienced.
We continue to see some customers who...where out of the blue....Google starts sending notably more traffic to their Q&A knowledge base overnight....even in recent weeks, but as far as an overall view of what the March and December core updates brought the above is what we'd communicate for now.
We do see that in December, for some customers the shift has been mostly in the impressions vs the clicks....see this example:
What we've seen in the past is in some of the previous core updates....what happens is Google puts the Q&A within the 11-50 positions....and then in a following core update it seems as if they move some of those Q&A's from the 11-50 position within the top 10..and that is when the clicks come in. See this shift from a previous update which shows that:
You can see the lift in top 10 positions in the above...and see what happens to the 11-50 positions as that doesn't see the lift....so perhaps it's shifting some of the Q&A out of the 11-50 position and moving into the top 10.....while using other Q&A to start to fill in other information gaps. We had seen something similar to that from Feb 2024 to July 2024 but pretty much across the board as Q&A started taking spots in the top 50 positions....as you can see the lift here which was a snapshot taken on July 1st and seems consistent across many of our customer's knowledge bases:
Answerbase will continue to analyze the data for our customers as we get more and more access to our customer's Google Search Console reports....and are working on our own analytics tools in order to track the activity not only on the Q&A knowledge bases but also the product, category and article pages that our Q&A capabilities are integrated within....but from what we can see Google's communication about steering towards "people first helpful content" and it's forecast to what it is steering towards and why seems completely consistent with what we're seeing in our customer's activity and the resource that Answerbase is using in order to support that content.
At this stage the Q&A knowledge base is responsible for over 45% of that merchant's organic traffic...and as the Q&A knowledge base has increased in value...it's had a clear impact on how the rest of their site (mostly product and category pages) has performed.
Well....we've seen a similar lift in the December update now....starting to see this around December 3rd where there was a notable lift in impressions and then clicks start following a few weeks after. The above example was an established SMB ecommerce merchant who has been answering questions well for awhile......but see this example of a new customer who started their Q&A knowledge base around March, their Q&A knowledge base has grown significantly since launch and you can see specific lifts to the content in Google's August Core Update and Google's December Core Update. See here:
That is over 500K organic visitors within the first 12 months of launching the Q&A knowledge base on their site. You can see the lift after July 18th.....and then a similar notable lift after Dec 3rd.....which continues to grow.
For existing customers....similar to the March update....where we saw customer's Q&A knowledge base go from a relatively low percentage of their overall search volume to a significant percentage....we saw the same thing in December. It seems like Google is making some kind of determination through these updates that these sections of the site are "helpful" and rewarding them. See this customer who went from the Q&A knowledge base being only about 2% of their organic traffic to 20% of their organic traffic.
And now we're seeing something similar in December's core update...where this customer's Q&A goes form about the same 2% to over 13% of their organic traffic now:
We've seen this with big sites, tiny sites, and just as our cloud infrastructure needed to scale notably after the August core update.....we've seen similar activity in the December core update to keep up with the demand for the information.
As we continue to dig into the data and look to get access to more and more of our customer's Google Search Console accounts....in order to get a full picture of what Google is reporting back related to this increased activity.....we think the more general experience is that we saw a slow and moderate increase in traffic to the Q&A knowledge bases since Google incoporated the helpful content system into their core ranking systems.....and then a huge a notable lift in August which reached a plateau....and now another lift after the December Core update and it is finding it's new plateau spot after. See here which would be our general impression of what is going on based on the data we're seeing this may be the accurate view of the overall activity that Q&A knowledge bases have experienced.
We continue to see some customers who...where out of the blue....Google starts sending notably more traffic to their Q&A knowledge base overnight....even in recent weeks, but as far as an overall view of what the March and December core updates brought the above is what we'd communicate for now.
We do see that in December, for some customers the shift has been mostly in the impressions vs the clicks....see this example:
What we've seen in the past is in some of the previous core updates....what happens is Google puts the Q&A within the 11-50 positions....and then in a following core update it seems as if they move some of those Q&A's from the 11-50 position within the top 10..and that is when the clicks come in. See this shift from a previous update which shows that:
You can see the lift in top 10 positions in the above...and see what happens to the 11-50 positions as that doesn't see the lift....so perhaps it's shifting some of the Q&A out of the 11-50 position and moving into the top 10.....while using other Q&A to start to fill in other information gaps. We had seen something similar to that from Feb 2024 to July 2024 but pretty much across the board as Q&A started taking spots in the top 50 positions....as you can see the lift here which was a snapshot taken on July 1st and seems consistent across many of our customer's knowledge bases:
Answerbase will continue to analyze the data for our customers as we get more and more access to our customer's Google Search Console reports....and are working on our own analytics tools in order to track the activity not only on the Q&A knowledge bases but also the product, category and article pages that our Q&A capabilities are integrated within....but from what we can see Google's communication about steering towards "people first helpful content" and it's forecast to what it is steering towards and why seems completely consistent with what we're seeing in our customer's activity and the resource that Answerbase is using in order to support that content.
