Google discover is a content distribution platform that Google uses to keep people engaged with topics they have shown some interest in. Their interests in a topic are determined based on signals from their search history, sites and topics they have bookmarked in the chrome browser, social media activity on platforms their gmail addresses are connected to, and explicit interest signals sent on Google discover cards.
Discover is a massive traffic boost to publishers. Apart from traffic, it also increases the geographic reach of content, allowing sites to bypass the organic competition in several countries. But not every site shows up in Google discover and there are a number of reasons for this.
So if your site is not showing in anyone’s discover feed, it could be due to any one of these reasons.
1) Content quality / Entity salience gaps
By content quality, I am referring to the average degree of entity salience your articles are able to achieve relative to the competition. Entities are described by Google as any thing or concept that is unique, singular, well defined and distinguishable. In linguistic terms, Google recognized entities are simply nouns.
So any sports personality, economic institution, political system or nation could be described as an entity.
Google has developed natural language processing models that are able to identify the centrality of an entity or group of entities to any web document. And this model can make comparisons about the level of entity coverage or salience across pages on different sites that are covering similar topics.
Discover works by identifying entities that specific smartphone users are interested in. It then selects articles from a variety of domains which have published highly salient copies around those entities of interest. So if your topical coverage and relevance to the concepts, events or entities is far lower than the threshold in your niche, your content will struggle to gain impressions on the discover platform.
To improve your content quality as it relates to entities, you need to first know what entity salience is and how it is measured in Google’s natural language processors.
2) Domain popularity
Domain popularity here refers to the likelihood that an unbiased searcher will find your site by randomly clicking on links. This means that the more integrated your site is within the searchable web, the more popular your domain will be deemed to be and the more impressions you will receive on Google discover. Domain popularity is a concept that is closely tied to pageRank. It simply means that the more the number of backlinks, the more likely it is for your content to be served to a random individual using an Android phone. So if your site is not yet being shown on Google discover, it could also be due to limited amounts of relevance acquired from other publishers on the web. So link building efforts are required to overcome this challenge.
3) Performance on search results pages
If a site exists that doesn’t rank for any keyword, it obviously cannot breakthrough on Google discover. If there’s a site that ranks for millions of keywords but gets zero clicks, it would be able breakthrough on Google discover.
This means that there are backend thresholds of performance on search results pages that are required before any piece of content can gain impressions on Google discover. If your site isn’t getting any impressions, it could be due to your performance being below these backend SERP performance thresholds.
4) Absence of a knowledge panel
The absence of a knowledge panel is one of the main reasons why a site could be totally blocked off on Google discover. The absence of a knowledge panel means that the site doesn’t exist in Google’s knowledge and entity graphs. This is a trustworthiness issue which puts the site on the wrong end of Google’s expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (EAT) philosophy. If an artisan isn’t known, he can never get any word of mouth referrals. The same reasons apply for sites without a knowledge panel. To acquire a knowledge panel, it’s best to verify your site on Google my business or get a Wikipedia listing.