Discover is a feature of Google that shows personalized content recommendations to users based on their interests and browsing history. It can be a great source of traffic for your website, especially if you have content that appeals to a wide audience and covers trending topics.
However, getting into Discover is not easy, and staying there is even harder. You may have noticed that your Discover traffic fluctuates a lot, or that some of your articles never get picked up by Discover at all.
In this article, I will show you a simple trick that I have used to boost my Discover traffic by republishing my most successful articles with some minor changes.
This trick has helped me generate thousands of clicks and hundreds of dollars from Discover in a short period of time.
But before I reveal the trick, let me explain how Discover works and what kind of content it favors.
How Discover Works and What Kind of Content It Favors
Discover is powered by a machine learning algorithm that analyzes various signals to determine what content to show to each user.
Some of these signals include:
- The user’s interests, preferences, and behavior
- The content’s quality, relevance, freshness, and popularity
- The content’s topic, category, and keywords
- The content’s featured image, title, and snippet
Based on these signals, Discover assigns a score to each piece of content and ranks them accordingly. The higher the score, the more likely the content is to appear in Discover.
However, Discover is not a static feature. It constantly updates and adapts to the user’s changing interests and the content’s changing performance. This means that your content may get into Discover one day, and disappear the next day.
Therefore, to succeed in Discover, you need to create content that:
- Matches the user’s interests and preferences
- Provides value, information, or entertainment to the user
- Covers a broad, pop-culture-y, or trending topic
- Has a catchy and click-worthy title and image
- Is updated and fresh
But creating such content is not enough. You also need to make sure that your content stays in Discover and gets more exposure. And this is where the trick comes in.
The Trick: Republish Your Most Successful Articles with Minor Changes
The trick is simple: find your most successful articles that have driven a lot of traffic from Discover in the past, and republish them with some minor changes.
By doing this, you are essentially creating a new piece of content that has the same topic, keywords, and quality as the original one, but with a different URL, title, and image.
This makes the content look fresh and new to Discover, and increases its chances of getting picked up again.
The changes you need to make are:
- Add a new product, feature, or angle to your content (for example, if your article is about the best laptops of 2023, you can add a new laptop that was released in 2024 as your top pick)
- Rewrite the introduction to allude to the new product, feature, or angle
- Change the title to include the current year or month (for example, Best Laptops of 2024: Our Top Picks)
- Change the URL to match the new title (for example, /best-laptops-2024/)
- Update the product numbering, pricing, and availability if necessary
Then, publish this new article with the changed URL, and wait for Discover to pick it up.
Here is an example of how I applied this trick to one of my articles:
- The original article was about the best gaming laptops of 2023, and it got 150,153 clicks from Discover in the last 6 months
- I added a new gaming laptop that was released in 2024 as my top pick, and rewrote the introduction to mention it
- I changed the title to Best Gaming Laptops of 2024: Our Top Picks
- I changed the URL to /best-gaming-laptops-2024/
- I updated the product numbering, pricing, and availability
I published this new article with the changed URL, and it got 50,000+ clicks from Discover in the first 3 days.
How to Turn This into a Traffic Machine
You can repeat this trick for each of your most successful articles that have driven more than 10,000 clicks from Discover in the last 6 months. These are your certified bangers.
If you have 10 certified bangers, you can republish one of them every 3 days across a 30-day month. Even if they average just 10,000 clicks each, you are adding a baseline of 100,000 clicks per month to your site.
And these are not any old clicks. Discover clicks have high RPMs (revenue per thousand impressions) and conversion rates.
In my case, I made $1,000+ from the affiliate traffic of the republished article.
But you don’t have to stop there. You can also find more bangers and add them to your roster.
To do this, you can look for existing content on your site that never took off in Discover, but has the potential to do so based on the criteria I mentioned earlier. You can republish these articles with minor changes and see if they get into Discover.
Alternatively, you can create new content that you suspect could be a banger, based on your niche, audience, and trends. You can use tools like Google Trends, BuzzSumo, or Ahrefs to find popular and relevant topics and keywords.
Then, update your banger roster, rinse and repeat, and print money.
The Caveats
There are some downsides to this trick. These can be mitigated, but I haven’t tested them yet, so you are free to try them and tell me if they work as well.
The main downside is that you are changing the URL of your original article, which may have some organic search traffic and backlinks. This means that you are losing some SEO benefits and authority.
To avoid this, you can do one of the following:
- Change the URL back to the original one and 301 redirect the new one to it, once the Discover traffic calms down. This way, you can preserve your SEO rankings and backlinks, while still getting the Discover boost.
- Publish a second version of the article with the minor changes, and keep the original one intact. This way, you can avoid duplicate content issues and cannibalization, while still creating a new piece of content for Discover. You can also 301 redirect the second version to the original one, once the Discover traffic calms down, to consolidate the SEO benefits and backlinks.
I don’t see this trick as an exploit, and I don’t think Google should either. The content is updated and relevant, and it provides value to the user. It also shows that the content is popular and engaging, which are positive signals for Discover.
If the Discover algorithm was improved to allow my existing content to continue to get Discover traffic when it is updated without changing the URL, then I wouldn’t need to do this. But right now, this is not happening, and so I’m having to make it look like fresh new content to get in, which the people clearly love and click on, so I’m fine with it.
And if it doesn’t work, then the real hack for Discover is really under your nose this whole time. 😉
I hope you found this article helpful and informative. If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions, please let me know in the comments below. And if you want more tips and tricks on how to grow your website traffic and revenue, please subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on social media. Thanks for reading!