Google: Google Discover Impacted By Many Search Signals, Including Now The Helpful Content Update (Nope, Google Changed Its Mind….)
Google has updated both the Google Discover help documentation and the Google helpful content system page documentation to clarify that Google Discover uses many of the same signals as Google Search for ranking. The big news is that previously Google told us the helpful content update did not impact Discover, but now Google says it does.
Note: This story was updated below, but in short… Originally the helpful content update only impacted Google Search, not Google Discover. This morning Google updated a help document to say the helpful content update/system impacts Google Discover. Later today, after I asked Danny Sullivan a number of questions, he looked into it and said, it still does not impact Google Discover.
Just to be clear, we already knew that core updates and other Google ranking systems impact Google Discover. Google told us core updates could impact Google Discover performance not just once but at least twice before. But the helpful content update impacting Discover, I think, is new.