How to show up on Google Discover: Google’s latest guidance

Google has made significant updates to the Google Discover help document designed to help publishers learn about how to get their content to show up in Google Discover. The document was updated a few days ago, as Kenichi Suzuki first noticed, and Google has now officially announced the change.

Google Discover is the content feed that appears on Google’s mobile home page on the web and its apps. Discover feed are personalized based on users’ search history, interests, as well as topics and places they follow.

E-A-T gets mention. The main thing most SEOs noticed is that Google has mentioned “expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness” in the document: “Our automated systems surface content in Discover from sites that have many individual pages that demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T). Those looking to improve E-A-T can consider some of the same questions we encourage site owners to consider for Search. While Search and Discover are different, the overall principles for E-A-T as it applies to content within them are similar.”

Related: There’s no shortcut to authority: Why you need to take E-A-T seriously

More optimization suggestions. Google also updated most of the other parts of the document to provide publishers guidance on the proper use of article titles, enabling high-quality large images and having timely, engaging content.

How to get your content in Google Discover. Google’s new guidance says to focus on these elements:

• Having page titles that capture the essence of the content, but in a non-clickbait fashion.
• Avoiding tactics to artificially inflate engagement by using misleading or exaggerated details in preview content (title, snippets, images) to increase appeal, or by withholding crucial information required to understand what the content is about.
• Avoiding tactics that manipulate appeal by catering to morbid curiosity, titillation, or outrage.
• Having content that’s timely for current interests, tells a story well, or provides unique insights.
• Providing clear dates, bylines, information about authors, the publication, the publisher, company or network behind it, and contact information to better build trust and transparency with visitors.
• Including 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 and enabled by the max-image-preview:large setting, or by using AMP. Avoid using a site logo as your image.

Why we care. Google Discover can send publishers immense traffic. It can also be a very unstable traffic source. These guidelines could help publishers garner more visibility on the Discover feed on a more consistent basis. Be sure to familiarize yourself with Google’s help document and guidance and hopefully your site can benefit from traffic via Google Discover.

Related: How do you optimize for Google Discover?

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.