15 Aug was the day when Google started to roll out August Core Update and for quite some time communication from Google about this update – it was expected that sites who have been by Helpful Content Update (HCU) rolled out last year in September will start to see some recovery and it did happened for some sites.
But as of me writing this (1 Sep | Melbourne time) there has been many sites that I know of or manage which were hit by the HCU but still are not seeing any recovery. Instead in some cases couple of sites have even decline further.
But one of my main focus or area of expertise is Google Discover – its been years since I have been working with many publishers helping them achieve amazing visibility and traffic from Google Discover.
Discover is quite complex and its not like the usual search rankings because its a scrollable feed and mostly shows content which can be relevant to a user based upon their previous search history.
Following Google’s Discover guidelines and aligning with the content policies is a good starting point for any site to get visibility in Discover but there’s a lot more to it as well. That’s why many publishers over the years have been paying me and other SEO professionals to help them optimise their content & site to be visible in Discover.
And its already a well known fact that traffic from Google Discover can be insanely volatile and even Google has recommended to not completely rely on it as well.
Which I totally understand and respect the fact that Google has clearly told this to site owners but its really unfortunate to see it actually happen!! and its happening with many publishers that I know or work with because of August Core Update!!
Even some of these publishers were completely turned off from Google Discover in July as well. Here is an example 👇 this publisher has been doing really well in Discover and has been getting around 700K to almost 2M clicks a day for almost a month but then suddenly it dropped and lost all of its visibility.
Nowadays its not even getting couple of clicks or impressions from Google Discover.
And here are 4 other publishers which almost got completely turned off from Google Discover in July.
Even though it was before the roll out of August Core Update started I’m sceptical that it might be the same algo changes which Google is rolling out at scale now with August Core Update because even in July there was lot of ranking volatility.
And even starting 10 July there was significant volatility in Google Discover. I posted about it on X.
But it can’t be said for sure what changes Google did in Discover in July but definitely from what I have personally seen in the data across multiple publishers its clear that they made some adjustments to their algorithms which are responsible for picking if a given page gets visibility in Google Discover or not.
Here are 2 other publishers which lost all of their visibility in Google Discover couple of days after roll out of August Core Update started on 15th.
And then on 27th August I got this email from Google – Discover Policy Violations for misleading content and its I think because of having catchy headline/title for the articles but that is a common practice which most of publishers do for getting better click through rate (CTR) and more people clicking to the site from their Discover feeds.
I’m working with these publishers nowadays to get this sorted out and submit an appeal to Google.
But still I’m exactly not sure what’s going on with Google and what specifically they are looking at to determine if a site should be turned off from Google Discover or not.
Also I recently noticed that Barry Schwartz posted on X that he will be interviewing Danny Sullivan from Google next week and was asking if anyone have solid questions to ask Danny.
I posted to ask Danny these two questions.
1) Why some publishers have lost Discover visibility but improving in Search rankings at the same time?
2) For Google Discover with August Core Update is Google looking for something other than alignment with Google’s Discover guidelines & policies. Because sites already aligned with their policies have suddenly been turned off on 16/17 Aug.
Both of these are relevant to what’s happening with publishers in Google Discover as August Core Update is rolling out.
Again I’m not sure why Google is completely turning off the sites from Discover and on top of this my biggest fear is that what if these sites end up being turned off from Discover for long period of time. Just like what happened with sites affected by Helpful Content Update and only starting to see some ranking improvement starting 15 August when the core update started to roll out.
If this happened with publishers turned off from Discover as well and they have to wait for a year to get back some visibility.
I think that unfortunately most of them will go out of business by then ……………
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