Google Discover now less aligned with search rankings

Google Discover is less aligned to Google Search ranking, Andy Almeida from the Google Trust and Safety team, said yesterday at the Google Search Central Live event in Zurich yesterday.

A slide he posted on how existing systems help the Google Discover team solve problems, the slide says:

“Minimal alignment to search ranking gives us the tools we need to combat emerging abuse.”

What this means. It seems that this is an admission that Google Discover is not using Google’s search systems as tightly as it may have in the past for when it comes to combating abuse on that platform.

I asked Andy Almeida at the event what this means, and he said it means that Google Discover aims to surface lesser-known, less-established, and smaller publishers in the Discover feed. So while Google Search may not rank these smaller and less known publishers, Google Discover does. It does this by relying less on Google Search ranking and more on its own systems.

The spam problem. As I mentioned, Google Discover has a big AI spam problem. You have new sites using expired domains, or new throwaway domains, and finding loopholes to get spammy content surfacing in Google Discover. This is something that does not work as well in Google Search.

In 2019, Google told us that the core ranking systems do impact Google Discover, specifically that being hit by a core update can impact a site’s visibility in Google Discover. This seems like a step back from this.

Why we care. As we also said, Google is working hard on fixing the spam issues on Google Discover. Tweaking the balance of allowing new or lesser-known sites to perform well on Google Discover, while also preventing spam from showing up, is hard. Google is working on that now and hopes to find a solid solution for it.

But it also means Google is looking for ways to reward smaller publishers, who may write more about niche topics, within Google Discover. This is a good thing for smaller, and upcoming publishers – if Google can also solve the spam problem on Google Discover.