Discover from 200.000 to 0: author pages?

[Blaugrana]

Hi,

Our google discover impressions went from 200.000 a day to completely 0 since last week! We changed the author pages (did an upgrade with profile expertise text, photo, socials, structured data) and changed the nickname to the full author name with new url (301 redirect)...

Chatgpt thinks this could be the cause of the drop... What do you guys think? Did we make a mistake? Can we still recover from this in Discover anytime soon?

[not2easy]

Changes will always affect ranking and indexing, to know whether the new version is an improvement or not will take some waiting.

You don't mention when the changes were made, but it would basically start from the day the changes were made until your results can make a positive or negative effect. That can take time, even though the instant effect would be negative. Any site wide changes would alter your ranking. Changing it back to how it was might send a signal of "manipulation" - efforts to influence the results. It could take weeks to know whether your changes are beneficial or not.

If you made an improvement, I would wait until they can sort out the changes.

[tangor]

Sounds like a LOT of change happened in a very short period of time. g does not like that. Might even cause a review, or at the very least, time to percolate through the dataset watching for game...

Inserting 301s is also a signal if it is a large amount (more than two or three A MONTH). Gives the impression of instability.

Just something to think about when considering future changes to the site.

[lucy24]

with new url (301 redirect)

That’s the right thing to do.

After you made this change, did you notice an increase in G requests for URLs in the form "/string-of-lowercase-letters.html"? This happens automatically whenever they ancounter an increase in 301s. They expect* to get a 404 response (because there's no such file), so I hope that is what they get.


* On the principle of “guilty until proven innocent”, they want to ensure you’re not doing Soft 404s.

[guarriman3]

This happens automatically whenever they ancounter an increase in 301s.

In general, an big increase of 301s leads to a "preventive corrective" action by Google?

[not2easy]

If the 301 leads to the same content, then it is not seen as a problem. When the 301 goes to very different content, especially if the landing page was an existing page, then it may seem to be something that Google will try to check for 404s. They want to be sure you don't just delete old pages and then redirect to prevent a 404. As lucy24 said,

they want to ensure you’re not doing Soft 404s.

[lucy24]

I think it’s completely automated. For example, every time I move a site to HTTPS--meaning that every single URL is redirected--there will be a rash of requests in the “wholly-imaginary-filename.html” format.

My take is that G is so vast, not everything is handled by the same computer running the same algorithm. So there's a function activated by the specific trigger of “this site is suddenly generating more redirects than it used to”, separate from and unrelated to the function that assesses if the new and old URL have the same content.