A questioner asked John Mueller, Google’s Search Manager – if increasing the number of links on your site’s main navigation menu from 5-10 to around 150 would affect your Google Discover Traffic? He stated unambiguously that any Google Discover traffic decline would not be related to the site’s navigation changes. John reiterated that Google Discover traffic is not something you should rely on and that Discover traffic can change without notice. Even worse, many SEOs don’t trust SEO advice for Discover. In short, there is no impact of expanding navigation menu of website on Google Discover traffic.
On Twitter John said that the Google Discover traffic changes and changes in navigation menus were not related. The Google Discover help document says, “Given Search’s serendipitous nature, Discover traffic is less predictable and dependable than Search traffic, and is considered supplemental to your Search traffic.”
Discussion on Expanding Navigation Menu of Website
Google changed that phrase to June 2020. This is the entire thread so that you can see the context:
I added 150 links to my site-wide navigation one day. Next, I decided to add the site-wide navigation at the top on every subfolder page and article throughout the site (above the respective sub-navs) and also added 170 additional links on each page 2
— Eva (@evalangelotti) April 14, 2022
Upon investigation, I found that the traffic drop occurred specifically on pages in the categories/subfolders where the site-wide nav was added above the sub-nav (adding 170 new links at the top of the affected pages). This change did not cause traffic to drop on unaffected pages(4)
— Eva (@evalangelotti) April 14, 2022
I wondered if it would be possible to make site-wide navigation changes at a high DA site that causes A. A significant reduction in crawl requests for subfolders affected, and B. Google’s inability to index subfolders fast enough to rank in Discover (6)
— Eva (@evalangelotti) April 14, 2022
Googlebot didn’t index new content fast enough to rank it in Discover. It also added nav links at scale. G could not index pages based on user intent/topic/entity because of the 170 additional links at the top.
— Eva (@evalangelotti) April 14, 2022
