My Google Discover traffic in the US/UK/CA and other regions dropped dramatically after Google's indexing glitch was reported last month. I still have traffic from India, South Africa and a few other countries, probably because the Google search glitch was rolled out in the US and Europe only?
My Discover traffic was doing just fine for more than a year, then dropped on August 10/11 to basically zero.
At the time of making this post, there's no recovery yet.
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Competitors are doing just fine. Also, I publish original articles regularly and I often get cited for my original work. I don't see my articles in Discover, but I do see sites that have cited me in their 2nd or 3rd para. Sucks to see others being promoted for your work, but nothing can be done - this is how Google works now :)
I have checked the server logs - No increase in 404. No increase in 5xx errors. Site is stable and fine in terms of speed. No errors anywhere.
I also flagged the problem to John, but he has nothing to share :) Also, I'm sure I'm not alone. A few other publishers have also flagged the same problem, but nobody cares, especially when you're not from the US.
I am not creating this thread for solutions. I just wanted to let you all know that Google could kill your business overnight, call it a glitch, and refuse to provide an explanation.
The backlinks, the original, fewer ads, good design nothing will work if Google's algorithm hates your site.
I've been blogging for over five years now. I get cited/linked back naturally and I have a great link profile. Despite my original work, I wouldn't appear in the Top Stories or front page of Google News, and now I'm out from Google Discover too.
I've been tweeting John the examples of how my original work is never rewarded, but those who cited me do appear. The examples are perfect and expose the reality that Google's algorithm truly sucks. I first tweeted the example in 2017 and they have made ZERO changes to fix this behaviour.
In fact, after May update, scrappers appear in Top Stories and Google Newsfeed. What's Google's solution? DMCA - as if it is a piece of cake ;)
Conclusion....? It's all Google's fault - I have nothing to fix :)
