Skip to summary of these changes or read what I found interesting or my advice for site owners to get more visibility in Google Discover.
Sometimes below the cards in Google Discover feed, Google asks for feedback from users.
Here is how it looks …. face emojis and there are 5 of them. When clicked on these Google shows some options to select and recently I’m noticing that Google is updating these options (some are changing even on daily basis).
Here is what Google doing for each of these feedback emoji faces.
Here are some new options (marked as yellow in the right side image above) for “Very bad”.
- Not interested anymore
- Issue with topic label
- Untrustworthy source(s)
- Clickbait
- Not in my language
- One-time search
Clickbait option has been around on/off previously.
For this option Google now adding new options (marked as yellow in the right side image above)
- One-time search
- Issue with topic label
- Untrustworthy source(s)
- Clickbait
- Not in my language
- Too much of this topic
For this option Google now adding new options (marked as yellow in the right side image above)
- Only slightly interested
- Content isn’t helpful
- Issue with topic label
For this option Google now adding new options (marked as yellow in the right side image above)
- Important news
- Learning something new
- Up to date
- Visually appealing
- Relevant to me
For this option “Very good” Google now adding new options (marked as yellow in the right side image above)
- Up to date
- Visually appealing
- Learning something new
- Important news
- Relevant to me
My Thoughts
So putting together all the options for feedback which Google is adding its these
- Not interested anymore
- Issue with topic label
- Untrustworthy source(s)
- Clickbait
- Not in my language
- One-time search
- Too much of this topic
- Only slightly interested
- Content isn’t helpful
- Important news
- Learning something new
- Up to date
- Visually appealing
- Relevant to me
What I found interesting I think out of all these Untrustworthy source (s) is an interesting one because it kind of goes along what SEO industry has been talking recently – Build a brand which of course moves away any site from being a Untrustworthy source of information because people are able to recognise it and therefore might find it trustworthy over other sites whose name/favicon/design of site people can’t recognise. I found it interesting that Google specifically is seeking feedback around Untrustworthy source which also means that Google want to show more of trustworthy sources/sites in Google Discover feeds of users.
Another thing which I found interesting is this label “Content isn’t helpful” this is actually really weird one because its almost impossible to exactly define what’s helpful for someone or what not and even in some cases, a single web page might be helpful for me but not for you. And now Google specifically asking for feedback about this!! Even though Google have put out some guidelines around what they consider helpful but I’m still sus about it because what they saying is helpful, isn’t what they showing in their search results??
Some key takeaways or clear action items for site owners to get visibility in Google Discover?
based upon these new feedback options
- Focus on building a brand so that users can recognise your site name, as they scroll through their Discover feed.
- Avoid doing clickbait titles/featured images, even though these usually attract more clicks but still this may, in extreme case, lead to misleading content Discover manual action, which means total removal of site from Discover and no visibility there at all.
- Focus on creating experience based content, where your sharing how your using/doing something, this specifically applies to affiliate articles, not only just share generic information about product rather share your personal story & experience of using it. This aligns with Google’s guidelines around helpful content.
- If its something really important news or an update, its a good idea to make that article is as visible as possible on the site, link to it from homepage and other pages too. So that it highlights to Google that its a really important page (Important news) therefore Google will treat it accordingly and hopefully show in feeds of more Discover users.
- Addition of “Up to date” as a feedback option, highlights that Google cares to show information in Discover that’s up to date, which means you as a site owner should be focused on making sure that content which your serving to users is latest information.
- And its interesting that Discover added “Visually appealing” to feedback options too, this is related to featured image which is being used for an article, for long time I have been telling my clients to use amazing & clear images so that when users see those in their feeds they are urged to click through. Its ok to use somewhat clickbaity images to achieve better click through rate, but just need to make sure that its too much over exaggerating otherwise that might lead to complete removal of site from Discover.
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