Mueller: Not All Web Stories Appear In Discover

The best SEO agencies today create efficient strategies to get their content on the Web Stories carousel in Discover. However, Google’s John Mueller has recently told SEO agencies that not every published web story can be featured in Discover.

Last October, Google Discover added its own web stories carousel, but it can only feature a small amount of content from publishers. Ever since the search engine giant added the web stories carousel, some SEOs and webmasters assume that publishing a web story will automatically be shown in Google Discover.

And if a story does get featured Google’s web stories carousel, no one can exactly measure the specific time it will appear in Discover. For any piece of content, whether it is a web story or a different type of webpage content, the time it takes to get indexed may vary. Sometimes, content gets indexed immediately, and sometimes, it may take a little longer.

But again, not all content can make it to Google Discover.

In a Google Search Central SEO episode, a website owner initially thought that creating a web story will automatically get it featured in Google Discover. So, he asked Mueller how long it usually takes for a web story to appear in Discover after publishing it.

Mueller said, “It depends”. According to Mueller, there are times when they can pick up the content as soon as it gets published, allowing them to crawl and index it immediately. But sometimes, the process may take a lot longer.

And since Discover users usually do not have specific queries or are just looking for random content to kill time, Google has to be more careful about what they feature in their web stories carousel. He said that they are meticulous in choosing the content because they want to make sure that the web story is suitable and appropriate for the readers.

Because of this, filtering the content may take longer than usual. He also pointed out that there is a possibility that it may never be shown in Discover.

Google may take longer in choosing content for their web stories carousel, but unlike stories that one can find on other websites, web stories do not have a shelf life. This means that it will stay published for as long as a business or a webmaster chooses to keep it up.

Unlike before, businesses and SEO agencies can optimise their web stories to increase the chances of getting into Discover just like how they would usually optimise a webpage. Moreover, Google Discover traffic is unpredictable most of the time. Even if a website gets steady traffic from Discover, SEOs and website owners should not entirely depend on it.

If an SEO or webmaster notices that their web stories do not appear in Google Discover or even in Google Search, it’s still worth looking into the cause. There may be issues that they are unaware of and must fix at all costs.

It’s highly recommended to use the AMP testing tool from Google to see if their web story is valid in Discover. The tool is useful for identifying any problems that may prevent the content from being published in Google’s web stories carousel.

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