Google News and Discover down by a lot

[SolenneGINX]

Hi,
Could you help me understand why my website's Google News and Discover Performance dropped suddenly and drastically all of a sudden in November? numbers seem to pick up a little bit again but nowhere close what we used to see before then

[amitydigital]

We worked with a content site years ago that focused mostly on superhero movie news and a lot of their traffic came from Google News. One day it just dried up and dropped by more than 90%. They brought us on to help and what we figured out was they were feeding Google their sponsored posts for months. The posts were made to look like news but were very clearly sponsorships pushing product so they got hit with a penalty. Not sure if that is what is going on with you but it's food for thought. As Tom mentioned, they are very volatile channels.

[SolenneGINX]

@tom-capper Thanks for the answer Tom. Much appreciated!

[Tom.Capper]

@solenneginx

Hi, sorry for super slow reply.

These are, unfortunately, highly volatile channels. There was a core update in November, and this can have an even larger update on Discover than organic.

All you can really do is check how you perform vs competitors on the issues that Google claims to be valuing - brand trust, site speed, content quality/depth, and so on. Google Discover is particularly sensitive to speed.

Of course, you should also check for any technical hitch with your own site that might be causing issues.