Google will be shutting down the Google Question Hub on January 15, 2023, about two years after the service launched in the United States and several years after it quietly launched in regions like India.
Shutting down. Google posted a message after you login at questionhub.withgoogle.com that says “As of January 5, 2023, the Question Hub beta will end. If you’d like to retain a copy of your data, you can do so via Google Takeout up until March 6, 2023. After that date, Question Hub user data will be deleted.”
What it looks like. Glenn Gabe posted a screenshot of this on Twitter:
What is Question Hub? Google says “Question Hub is a tool that enables creators to create richer content by leveraging unanswered questions. Question Hub collects these unanswered user questions and surfaces them to bloggers, writers, and content creators like you.”
It is basically a way for Google to enable searchers to tell it that the search results provided are not answering the query. Then, Google takes those questions and feeds them to publishers, who, in turn, can create content that does answer the query.
Content ideas in Search Console. We recently saw Google experiment with a new section in Google Search Console named Content ideas. Content ideas give the content creator, publisher, SEO, webmaster, etc., some tips and advice on what new topics they can write about on their site.
The big question is, will Google move the Question Hub like features into this new Content ideas section in Google Search Console?
Why we care. Creating content ideas can sometimes be a struggle for writers, which may help content creators with that process. With Question Hub going away, there is even more of a reason for Google to add this to Search Console. Hopefully Google will be moving this feature and not completely getting rid of it.
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About The Author
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.
