Google Shows How to Optimize for Beta Discover Follow

A new article on Search Engine Journal says that now you can get more traffic because Google just published guidance on how to optimize a site to receive followers from the Discover Follow feature currently in Beta.

Google just added new documentation for a beta feature that allows users to follow a website on their Google Discover feed. The feature allows users to follow a website and see them in their Discover feed when a new article is published. The new feature will show up for users in the United States who are using Chrome Android Beta (also known as Chrome Canary).

Although Google has been testing this feature since May 2021, it just added documentation for it in Google Search Central. The Discover Follow feature is being shown to a limited set of users, but it still may be useful to get in first and begin obtaining loyal readers through Discover.

Publishers don’t necessarily have to do anything to be successfully followed, but Google does recommend that publishers have an up-to-date RSS or Atom feed that Google can use to identify new articles. Google also has a way for publishers to communicate which feed can be used for following in Discover.

“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 feeds you want people to follow for a given page on your site.”

Google requires that you add the feed to what it calls hub and leaf pages. Hubs are the main landing pages like the category and archive pages. Leaf pages are the pages the individual articles that the hub links out to. If the site only has one feed, then the same feed can go into the head section of every page.