How Google Decides When to Add Source Links in Quick Answers...or Not

Google's Knowledge Graph & Quick Answers have been expanding over the years to include more and more information right within the search results. This has brought a lot of frustration to site owner's as they struggle to maintain traffic to their content - all while Google is placing an increasing number of answers to basic queries directly in the search results. There has also been the standing question of when Google cites its source and when they don't.

SERoundtable reached out to Google and asked them about linking out to sources of information and as usual, Google's response is unlikely to make you feel much better.

When it's basic factual information you can find many places (e.g., when Obama was born), we just present it as is. When it's not widely-known information, or when we show relevant snippets from webpages, we typically do show the source (though we may not in some cases where we're working directly with the source).

What they explain seems to hold true from our own internal testing. Larger more complex queries most often result in a link to the source while more common questions don't include the source.

What you can do for the best chance of getting visitors to your site is to be sure that you continue to publish not only unique quality content but in-depth content as well. Go beyond answering the basic questions and provide information that isn't common knowledge.