Hits from Google Discover with source Newsshowcase

[Francesc Invernon]

Hi everyone,

We recently saw an increasing number of page views coming from utm_source:newsshowcase.

That is not a problem by itself, but the medium is utm_medium=discover.

In order to get hits from Google Showcase, you have to manually put the article you want to be featured by Google in the Google News Publisher Center, and then it generates those views.
The problem is that we are seeing traffic from Newsshowcase, in articles that we didn't publish on Showcase.

Example of raw hit:

https://www.example.com?utm_source=newsshowcase&utm_medium=discover&utm_campaign=AAbcdEFgwKhAIACoHCAowm52iCzDep7oDMJq10gIw6a_-Ag&utm_content=bullets

Is Google Discover featuring and publishing automatically articles on our newsshowcase and showing them on Google Discover (as deduced by the UTM), without our manual action?
Anyone noticed that behavior?

THX in advance

[edited by: not2easy at 3:44 pm (utc) on Apr 2, 2024]
[edit reason] exemplified URL for readability [/edit]

[morpheus83]

Isn't Google News Publisher Center automated? It pulls articles from our RSS feed.

[Francesc Invernon]

Hi there,

Yes, publisher center is automated. But what i'm talking about is hits from Google Showcase, not the same as Google News.

As i mentioned those hits are made to urls with this UTM ?utm_source=newsshowcase&utm_medium=discover...

It is normal to have this utm on URLS manualy chosen by our editorial team, but some times we get hits to urls that we didn't push to NewsShowcase.

[tangor]

Sometimes internal URLs get picked up by the search engines (of whatever kind) and hits start appearing across the webiste(s)....

Might also be general testing on the SE's side.

Unless egregious I wouldn't worry, but would keep an eye on things.