Webmasters have been concerned for years about the rich answers/direct answers that Google shows at the top of search results. These are the times when Google provides information directly on the search results page as opposed to sending you to another site.
The fear is that if Google is giving users the info right there on the results page, they’ll have no reason to click over to your site. Given that this info oftentimes comes from third-party websites, some consider this to be Google scraping said sites – a practice Google of course looks down on when determining which third-party sites to show in its regular results.
Either way, Google has shown more and more of these types of results over the years. In October, Stone Temple Consulting released some research finding that rich answers appeared in 22.6% of results pages in December 2014, growing to 31.2% in July. That number has likely risen more since then.
This week, Stone Temple released an interesting video discussing why these types of results can actually drive traffic to your site rather than suppress it.
You can read the transcript here if you don’t feel like sitting through the video.