Google Updates Guidance On How to Qualify For Discover Traffic

Google has updated the Search Central Discover documentation to replace the guidelines about EAT with new guidelines that shift the focus toward recommending useful content. The clarification in the guide coincides with the simultaneous update of the useful content system guidelines that add reference to Google Discover content.

Google Discover is part of the search

Changes to the Google documentation emphasize the fact that Google Discover is a feature of Google Search.

It’s a way to display content relevant to a user’s interests, but without requiring users to type in keywords.

Although Discover is part of Search, Search Console offers a Google Discover report that provides Discover-based traffic data (Review the Search Console Discover report here).

Google removes guidance about EAT

The Search Central Google Discover page removed a paragraph and added another.

The removed paragraph relates to the importance of developing content with EAT qualities.

EAT is an acronym for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, which are qualities that the Google Quality Evaluators Guidelines recommend that raters look for in certain types of content (such as in the brokerage and financial fields).

This is what has been removed:

Our automated systems display content in Discover from sites with many single pages that demonstrate expertise, reliability, and trustworthiness (EAT).

Those looking to improve EAT can consider some of the same questions we encourage site owners to consider for research.

Although research and discovery are different, the general principles of EAT as they apply to the content within them are similar. “

I wouldn’t take that as a sign that eating (or EEAT) isn’t my thing anymore.

Perhaps the reason for removing the mention of EAT has to do with the notion that EAT is redundant when the useful content and useful content system is invoked in the Google Search Center documentation.

Google recommends useful content for Discover

An illustration to the Search Central documentation states that writing useful content is important to qualifying for traffic discovery.

Advising people to create useful content is much more actionable than asking them to make their sites more eatable.

A great deal of misinformation and confusion has arisen around the topic of eating.

The lack of explicit, actionable advice from Google about EAT has left a void for some to step in and offer their guesses as to how to tinker with the non-existent EAT rating signal.

But that’s Google’s fault for not getting ahead of the EAT train before SEO leaves the station with it.

The guidance about the content system being useful is significantly more actionable.

This is what Google added to the Search Central Discover documentation:

As part of Google Search, Discover uses many of the same signals and systems that Search uses to identify useful, people-centered content first.

Given this, those looking to find success with Discover should review our advice on creating useful and reliable content for those people.”

Again, I wouldn’t read too much into Google to replace EAT-related content with content related to the useful content system.

The useful content system applies to Google Discover

The Google Discover documentation does not specifically mention the useful content system with regard to qualifying for Discover traffic.

But the Search Central documentation has been updated directly to Link traffic discovery to a useful content system.
Google has updated a paragraph to include a reference to Google Discover. Aside from including instructions on spotting traffic, the paragraph remains relatively the same.

This is the original paragraph from Google’s useful content system page:

“The system generates a site-wide signal that we consider among many other signals to rank web pages.

Our systems automatically identify content that appears to be of little value, has little added value, or is not particularly useful to those conducting searches.”

This is the updated clip from the same web page:

The system generates a site-wide tag that we consider among many others for use in Google search (including Discover).

The system automatically identifies content that appears to be of little value, has little added value, or is not particularly useful to people.

It is no coincidence that the Google Discover page was updated to encourage publishers to focus on useful content on the same day that the useful content system documentation was also updated to include Discover pages.

Read and compare the documents:

Documentation of the original discovery

Discover updated documents

Documentation of original useful content

Updated useful content documentation

Featured image by Shutterstock / Asier Romero