Google Discover is a personalized feed for users which brings fresh and interesting content for them. The Discover Follow feature allows users to follow a particular site.
According to Google, the Follow feature lets people follow a website and get the latest updates from that website in the Following tab within Discover in Chrome.
So, Google added guidance about what to include in the RSS feed for the Follow feature in Google Discover.
Update in Google Discover Follow Feature
The most important content for the Follow feature is your feed <title> element and your per item <link> elements. Make sure your feed includes these elements.
Google explained that linking RSS or Atom feed links in the <head> section of your hub and leaf pages helps Google algorithm to understand which feed you want people to follow.
For example, this <link> element would be on the Search Engine Week home page (the hub page), and on each individual blog post pages (the leaf page).
Google also asked web maters to follow some guidelines to make sure Google systems can find and understand website RSS/Atom feeds easily.
- Don’t block feed URLs with Disallow rule in the robots.txt file.
- Update feed URLs regularly along with Sitemap.
- The most important content for the Follow feature is your feed <title> element and your per item <link> elements. Make sure your feed includes these elements in your RSS feed.
- Use a brief but descriptive title for your RSS feed.
- Google also supports hosting feeds on 3rd party servers.
- Google can follow the use of a 3xx (redirects) HTTP status code in Feed.
Google Discover is a great source of high-quality user traffic after Google Search and Google News.
So, make sure that your website’s RSS/Atom feeds are properly optimized to get relevant traffic beyond organic search.
Currently, the Follow button is a feature that’s available to signed-in users in English in the US, New Zealand, South Africa, UK, Canada, and Australia that are using Chrome Android.