Hey everyone.
I wanted to start a thread about Google Discover Observations to try and see where everyone stands regarding Google Discover traffic.
For the past year or so, my news website, which primarily publishes articles on Animals (but other subjects as well), was receiving a large amount of daily traffic from Discover, mostly on articles about Cats and Dogs. Some days were much better than others, and some other days I would get almost no traffic for periods of 3-7 days, but then it would pick right up and I would get a good flow of traffic from Discover for days, even weeks. Facebook had always been my primary source of traffic, but when Discover started sending me visitors, it easily doubled my Facebook traffic.
But recently, on August 28, a bit more than two weeks after the Google Indexing Glitch, Discover went totally silent and hasn’t picked up since. It’s the first time in a year that Discover dies for such a long time and I have to admit this is very confusing and worrying. I had two articles unrelated to Animals that got picked up, but with very little traffic and nothing compared to what it used to be.
What I noticed looking at my own Discover Feed is that it seems like Google definitely pushed an update that is showing much more content from mainstream publishers than before. My feed used to be populated with many different websites about interesting subjects, but now it seems like all I see are articles coming the same 10-20 mainstream publishers or so.
I also noticed recently that a message appeared in my Discover Feed that said something along the lines of: “We are going to show you more articles that are tailored to you.” Maybe you’ve noticed this message as well. It appeared for me a few days ago. So I’m guessing this might hint to a Discover algorithm change.
I think my website has pretty good E-A-T with my publisher name as the main author of articles, contact info and public business info. I would also say my search rankings are good and haven’t significantly changed recently or in the past year, only the usual ups and downs. So really, I’m totally baffled.
I’d be happy to hear what you have to say about Discover, whether you have a suggestion to share or have something to say about your own experience or anything else that might be worth sharing. I saw some people mention in other threads that they had also experienced a traffic drop from Discover. If it happened to you, I’d be curious to hear about it as well.
Thanks.
