Google Discover Traffic Completely Dead since End Of August

[jc2021]

Anyone else notice something going on?

Screenshot: [imgur.com...]

[rustybrick]

Your site was most likely impacted by the Google August 2023 core update.

[jc2021]

Yes I am aware of this. How can it be that my traffic has gone to ZERO due to this update? This is unbelievable. Any chance of recovery?

[not2easy]

It has only been started less than two weeks now, so you have as much chance of recovery as anyone else. No core update is complete in this short time. It is still being shuffled and sorted.

[jc2021]

Still dead here. Zero traffic from Discover.

I find it unacceptable that Google can just decide to stop traffic altogether, it's not even throttled. But fully stopped.

[Rod_Sa]

My Discover traffic looks like yours. On August 25th my Discover traffic fell off a cliff and yesterday I received 0 impressions from hundreds of thousands I was receiving daily for years.

On Discover I am seeing pretty much only websites with a lot of authority like newspapers.

What I find infuriating is that one of the very few "small" sites that still appears on my discover feed is my main competitor site, which most of the time only posts Amazon products. He copies and pastes the amazon description and puts his affiliate link, he adds nothing else.

I am from Latin America, by the way.

[jc2021]

It has to recover somehow. It seems unrealistic that they will block us forever from appearing on Discover for years.

[jc2021]

*How long does it take to recover from a core update?*

[developers.google.com...]

Broad core updates tend to happen every few months. Content that was impacted in Search or Discover by one might not recover—assuming improvements have been made—until the next broad core update is released.

However, we're constantly making updates to our search algorithms, including smaller core updates. We don't announce all of these because they're generally not widely noticeable. Still, when released, they can cause content to recover if improvements warrant.

Do keep in mind that improvements made by site owners aren't a guarantee of recovery, nor do pages have any static or guaranteed position in our search results. If there's more deserving content, that will continue to rank well with our systems.

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Rod_Sa

I am from Latin America, by the way.

That's interesting, is this yet more of Google localisation?

Before the update from where was the majority of your traffic?

Are you getting any traffic whatsoever from Latin America?

[lhcbr]

Hello!
I'm also from Latin America (Brazil), and the topics stopped appearing on Google Discover after the 22nd. Here's the graph: [imgur.com...]

The website simply died.

[Rod_Sa]

Before the update from where was the majority of your traffic?

Are you getting any traffic whatsoever from Latin America?

I'm from Mexico, and the site's traffic is 99% Mexico.

I'm also from Latin America (Brazil), and the topics stopped appearing on Google Discover after the 22nd. Here's the graph: [imgur.com...]

Wow you got hit hard considering the huge amount of traffic you were getting before.

My site has had Discover dips before. At the end of May 2023 my site had a huge dip and it had very low impressions for about a week and then it recovered. But nothing like this, my site had never gone down to 0 impressions before.

So going back to what jc2021 said about recovering from a core update if you improve your website. Are you guys trying anything? Last time this happened the site just started appearing again without doing anything. I already follow the Discover guidelines with big images, AMP, RSS feed and frequent updates.

I checked my competitor's website (the one that still appears on Discover) and I'm at a loss. Here are the facts:

• My site ranks higher in SERPs for the main keywords of my niche
  
• My domain has higher domain authority on Moz
  
• My site has better score on Speed Insights
  
• I checked one of the posts of competitor's website that appeared in discover. The image size was just 600px, the post had very little text.
  
• Another post that appeared in Discover from competitor's website isn't even on his homepage. You have to use search to find it. It does appear in his RSS feed.
  
• Competitor's website does have more followers on social media. Also, his RSS feed looks "nicer"
  

So without doing something drastic at the moment I will just improve the look of my RSS feed to include featured images directly on the feed (as my competitor's feed), but to be honest I don't think this will help at all.

[jc2021]

"Last time this happened the site just started appearing again without doing anything"

How long did it take you last time?Was it just a few weeks?

[Rod_Sa]

It took about a week to recover. But as I said it never went this low in terms of impressions, it was just a dip in which I started to get less than 10,000 impressions a day from the usual 200K-500K. There were still some impressions, now is basically dead.

[jc2021]

Looks like Google completely finished the algo update. Still ZERO impressions here.

[searchengineland.com...]

[searchengineland.com...]

[jc2021]

Anyone here managed to recover their traffic? I am still at zero.

[lhcbr]

I am still at zero too!

[Rod_Sa]

Me too. Still 0 impressions from discover.

It looks as if the site was penalized or something like that. I have another website that appears on discover every once in a while with very few impressions (fewer than 10,000 a month on average). That site has appeared more on discover the last couple of weeks than my main site which was receiving millions of impressions every month.

[jc2021]

I am sure we are penalised because I do not see many reports of people with the same issue.

If there were, it would be a much bigger topic.

No one on other platforms is talking about this.

[tangor]

Do keep in mind that improvements made by site owners aren't a guarantee of recovery, nor do pages have any static or guaranteed position in our search results. If there's more deserving content, that will continue to rank well with our systems.

Emphasis added...

...who decides on "more deserving content" is the same folks writing the algos.

[jc2021]

I am beginning to think this is a penalty.

Do the affected users in this thread post content that might be deemed 'offensive' to Google?

I do not believe the zero impressions is due to the algo update anymore.

[BeckerHeinz]

Same here with our site - dropped from 750.000 impressions to zero and still nothing.

My theory is that is has to do with products. Our site has many products and in march/april Google introduced Products-Ads in the Discover-Feed - so I guess they now sorted out the non-paid-product-related content.

Is there someone who can confirm this?

[porioo]

Hello, same thing here. On september 15th our traffic dropped from 90000 clicks per day (In average) to zero.

It is intense since we did not change anything and we always had a pretty good traffic from Google Discover since 2020.

First time we see a huge drop like this.

We know it may be related to the new Google Helpful Content update but did anyone manage to fix this issue?

[Rod_Sa]

I am sure we are penalised because I do not see many reports of people with the same issue.

Even though I haven't seen many reports on this issue, what I can tell you is that there are TONS of blogs/sites that used to appear on my discover feed which don't appear anymore.

Most of the sites on my discover feed are news sites. It is really disappointing because I see these big news sites sometimes stealing content from smaller websites. Nowadays these big news sites write about everything because they know they will get a lot of free traffic no matter what content they post. Just last week a big news site took content from my site without attribution and the stolen content appeared on discover.

Do the affected users in this thread post content that might be deemed 'offensive' to Google?

Not at all, no offensive content. I have 0 posts that "need to be fixed" in Adsense Policy Centre. My site doesn't deal with any controversial content.

My theory is that is has to do with products. Our site has many products and in march/april Google introduced Products-Ads in the Discover-Feed - so I guess they now sorted out the non-paid-product-related content.

I can confirm that my main competitor still appears on discover and he posts a lot of Amazon products.

We know it may be related to the new Google Helpful Content update but did anyone manage to fix this issue?

Still 0 impressions on my end. I don't even know what to "fix" in order for my site to appear on discover again.

[Da000189]

Still 0, any news?

[jc2021]

No news. Also still at ZERO.

[Bewenched]

If it makes anyone feel better our site was hammered with the recent update. 25yr old domain, no affiliate links, straight B2C ecommerce. No major changes in the last 4 years other than adding new products.

[ami3810]

Did anyone manage to recover their traffic? One of our websites got hit on the 10th of October and Discover Traffic went in an instant from 3K users to 0.

[Rod_Sa]

I am sad to report that my site hasn't recovered and am still at 0

[phranque]

One of our websites got hit on the 10th of October...

there was an announced October 2023 core update [webmasterworld.com] that may have affected your traffic.

[jc2021]

Do you guys have good core web vitals? no big seo errors according to semrush/ahrefs etc?

Btw, still at zero here since august 24th.