Google has removed the ability to opt out of Education Q&A carousel in its search results. The original help documentation had a section with a link to a form to request not to show your content in the Education Q&A carousel, which was now removed.
Google launched Education Q&A structured data just about a year ago, and has been adding new features, reports and guidelines over the past several months. But now, if you want to opt out, you cannot request removal.
Google wrote previously, “we may automatically show your content in the Education Q&A carousel.” Google then wrote, “To opt out from appearing in the Education Q&A; carousel, fill out this form.” The form actually still is live, for now, you can access it over here but I suspect they will stop checking the form results now.
Here is a screenshot of the section removed from that help document:
These are the two types of pages that support the Education Q&A structured data:
- Flashcard page: A page that contains flashcards that typically have a question on one side and an answer on the other side. To mark up flashcard pages, continue reading this guide to learn how to add Education Q&A schema.
- Single Q&A page: A page that only contains one question and is followed by user-submitted answers. To mark up single Q&A pages, add QAPage markup instead.
Now, it seems like if Google wants to show your content in the education Q&A carousel, even if you do not use the markup and Google detects it automatically, there is no way for you to opt-out, outside of the traditional noindex and robots.txt methods.
To be fair, most structured data and rich result elements do not have opt-outs – so it was unusual that this feature did have a special opt-out.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
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