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  3. Google Discover SEO Best Practices

Google Discover SEO Best Practices

What is Google Discover and why is important to SEO?

Google Discover is a highly personalized content feed that aims to show users content relevant to their interests. The content shown to users in a Discover feed can include links to articles around the web and YouTube videos. Google is able to utilize user data collected through Google Search history as well as Chrome and YouTube browsing history in order to create a personalized collection of timely content that will entice clicks from users. In Google’s own words, “Discover surfaces content primarily based on what Google's automated systems believe to be a good match with a user's interests” (source).

Google Discover feeds appear in a few places. On iOS and Android devices, the Discover feed begins directly below the search bar in the Google App, as shown below. Google Discover feeds are also native to the Android user experience on Google Pixel phones. Users can access their Discover feeds by swiping left from the home screen of their devices.

How does Google Discover work?

Google Discover curates content from around the internet that it believes will be relevant to a particular user based on web browsing and search patterns. There are several types of content that can appear in a Google Discover feed, listed below:

Article Links

Most article links that appear in Google Discover are sourced from non-Google publishers. The links appear as cards that include a headline and thumbnail image, and include the name and favicon of the article publisher.

Web Stories

Web stories are Google’s version of the popular “story” format found on social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat. Stories typically blend video, images and audio into short-form pieces of content that a user can scroll through. Unlike Instagram stories, Google’s Web stories are individual URLs on your site. Here is a link to Google’s documentation on creating Web Stories.

YouTube Videos

Google Discover feeds often feature YouTube videos. Google does not have any specific guidelines for enabling YouTube videos to appear in Discover. Video recommendations are heavily personalized, and based on the YouTube viewing habits of logged-in Google users on iOS and Android devices.

YouTube Shorts

In addition to standard format YouTube videos, Google Discover feeds can also contain YouTube Shorts. As is the case with standard YouTube Videos, there are no technical requirements that need to be met by Short Videos to be featured in Google Discover.

Discovery Ads

Google monetizes Discover feeds by displaying targeted ads. Google defines these as Google Discovery campaigns. They can be enabled and configured in Google Ads. Discovery ads can be images or videos.

A single Discovery campaign can reach users on YouTube, Discover and the Gmail app, as shown below:

Google Discover guidelines

There are not many technical requirements to be featured in Google Discover, compared to Google News. You do not need a specific sitemap for Google Discover, nor is there any sort of manual submission process to make your content eligible for Discover feeds.

In Google’s words, “Given the serendipitous nature of Discover, traffic from Discover is less predictable or dependable when compared to Search, and is considered supplemental to your Search traffic” (source).

Google itself has said that Discover placements can be difficult to control or guarantee, which makes Discover traffic even less predictable than Google Search traffic. Despite this, Google recommends a few technical and content-focused best practices in order to give your site the best chance at receiving Discover feed placements.

Technical Guidelines for Article Links

There are two technical requirements that are recommended by Google in order to be featured in Discover feeds, listed below. These recommendations apply only to the ‘Article Link’ content types. These technical guidelines do not apply to YouTube videos or shorts, web stories or Ads.

Follow Feature

The Follow Feature references the RSS feed of a site in order to allow users to “follow” your site in order to stay up-to-date on your content.

According to Google, “By default, the Follow feature uses RSS or Atom feeds on your website. If you don't have an RSS or Atom feed on your website, Google automatically generates a feed for your entire domain based on our view of your site. If you have one or more feeds on your website, you can optimize your Follow experience by explicitly telling Google which feed you want people to follow for a given page on your site”.

In other words, if you have multiple RSS feeds, you will need to specify which feed people should follow by placing a link referencing the correct RSS feed in the header of your site. If you only have one RSS feed, Google will detect it automatically and you do not need to place the manual RSS link. The manually placed link would look like the following:

To make sure Google can find and understand your RSS or Atom feed, follow Google's Search Central Guidelines (source):

  • Don't block your feed with your robots.txt file.

  • Make sure that your feed is up-to-date, like you would for sitemap files.

  • Use a brief but descriptive title for your RSS feed, just like you would for a web page.

  • Recommended: Google Search Central Blog

  • Not recommended: RSS Feed or Central Blog

  • You can host your feed somewhere other than your domain; Google supports this.

  • If you redirect your feed, use a 3xx (redirects) HTTP status code so that Google can follow it.

Specifying Multiple RSS Feeds

If your site has multiple RSS feeds that correspond to different types of articles, Google recommends a few different options to ensure that Google is referencing the correct RSS feed for a given article.

According to Google, “If you have multiple feeds on your website (for example, a news website with RSS feeds for the front page, business section, and technology), we recommend that you add a <link> element to a single feed that makes sense for that page. A single feed is easier to maintain, and is a better user experience when people are subscribing to your content. For example, if the article is about technology, specify the technology feed in the <link> element.”

Images

Images are a major part of the Google Discover experience. When you scroll through Google Discover, you’ll notice that images take up a large portion of screen real estate in the feed. An article’s click through rate is going to be largely influenced by how compelling and eye-catching the image is.

Regarding technical requirements for images, Google’s guidelines are as follows:

  • Include compelling, high-quality images in your content, especially large images that are more likely to generate visits from Discover.

  • Large images need to be at least 1200 px wide.

  • Images should be enabled by the max-image-preview:large setting, or by using AMP.

  • Avoid using a site logo as your image.

Meeting these requirements will prevent your site from being excluded from Discover feeds based solely on the quality of its images.

Content Guidelines for Article Links

The largest factor in determining a site’s placement in Google Discover is the quality of its content. Google’s recommendations on this topic are more qualitative than quantitative. A common theme across Google’s set of best practices for Discover content is a resistance to “click-bait” headlines that withhold information about the article or misrepresent what a user will be reading. Google’s content recommendations are as follows:

  • Use page titles that capture the essence of the content, but in a non-clickbait fashion.

  • Avoid tactics to artificially inflate engagement by using misleading or exaggerated details in preview content (title, snippets, or images) to increase appeal, or by withholding crucial information required to understand what the content is about.

  • Avoid tactics that manipulate appeal by catering to morbid curiosity, titillation, or outrage.

  • Provide content that's timely for current interests, tells a story well, or provides unique insights.

Content Timeliness

Winning placements in Google Discover requires not only creating quality content, but producing content quickly in response to breaking news and stories. The “shelf life” of an article within a Google Discover feed may only be 1 or 2 days. This is typically reflected in the performance data of Google Discover, discussed later in this guide.

According to a Search Engine Journal study, 46% of a sample size of Google Discover URLs were news sites and 44% were Ecommerce. Sites that produce content in response to trending stories have a significant advantage over other categories of sites.

According to the same SEJ study, pages from the following industries only make up 1-2% of the URLs appearing in Google Discover:

  • Health

  • Education

  • Finance

  • Travel

  • B2B

  • Automotive

Measuring Google Discover performance in Google Search Console

Clicks are defined as the count of all clicks from Google Discover that landed on your canonical URL. Impressions are defined as the number or frequency of links to your site that a user saw on Google Discover within a specific data range. It's important to note that impressions are only counted when a link from your site is scrolled into view. Scrolling away and then back into view will only be counted as a single impression during a session and therefore will not inflate the impression count. The average CTR or click-through rate is measured as total clicks / total impressions.

The clicks, impressions and CTRs for Discover traffic in the dashboard all come from “article links” in Discover feeds. These dashboard metrics do not include activity on YouTube videos, web stories or Ads.

Metrics Definitions

Clicks are defined as the count of all clicks from Google Discover that landed on your canonical URL. Impressions are defined as the number or frequency of links to your site that a user saw on Google Discover within a specific data range. It's important to note that impressions are only counted when a link from your site is scrolled into view. Scrolling away and then back into view will only be counted as a single impression during a session and therefore will not inflate the impression count. The average CTR or click-through rate is measured as total clicks / total impressions.

The clicks, impressions and CTRs for Discover traffic in the dashboard all come from “article links” in Discover feeds. These dashboard metrics do not include activity on YouTube videos, web stories or Ads.

Trendlines

The dashboard also includes trendlines for each data source. Given the timeliness of Google Discover traffic, you will typically see spikes in traffic for a particular day when a story was relevant. As shown in the report configuration section below, the dashboard makes it easy to select a particular day to determine which URLs in the table below were responsible for a given traffic increase.

Data Aggregation

The data in the report is aggregated by page which means that if a single domain provides multiple Google Discover results in a single user session, each result is credited to the page URL rather than the domain. It's also important to note that all page/URL metrics are assigned or rolled up to a single "canonical" URL. This means that the URL shown in the report will always be the canonical URL, which also means that the report will not show the AMP version of the URL as the AMP version is usually canonicalized. Instead, the canonical version will contain a rollup of all metrics inclusive of AMP.

Can I Also Track Google Discover Traffic in Google Analytics?

No, unfortunately Google Discover traffic can not be reliably tracked in Google Analytics. Google Discover performance data can only be viewed in Google Search Console, or within dashboard tools leveraging Google Search Console data.