Google Says Expanding Your Navigation Menu Does Not Impact Google Discover Traffic

Google’s John Mueller was asked if going from 5 to 10 links in your site’s main navigation menu to about 150 links in that navigation menu would result or possibly impact your Google Discover traffic. John unequivocally said no, any Google Discover traffic drop would be unrelated to your site navigation change there.

In general, John explained again that you should not depend on Google Discover traffic and that Discover traffic can come and go without warning. Heck, most SEOs are not confident with SEO advice for Discover specifically.

John said on Twitter the navigation menu changes are “unrelated” to the Google Discover traffic changes. He then referenced the Google Discover help document that says “Given the serendipitous nature of Discover, traffic from Discover is less predictable or dependable when compared to Search, and is considered supplemental to your Search traffic.” Note, Google updated that document with that phrase in June 2020.

Here is the full thread, so you can read the full context:

One day, I decide to add ~150 new links to my site-wide nav. Then, I also decide to place the site-wide nav at the top of every subfolder door page and article across the site (above respective sub-navs, adding ~170 new links at the top of each individual page)…(2)

— Eva (@evalangelotti) April 14, 2022

Upon investigation, I find that the drop in traffic 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). Traffic did not drop on pages unaffected by this change(4)

— Eva (@evalangelotti) April 14, 2022

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My question is, would it be possible for site-wide navigation changes on a high DA site to cause A. Significant reduction in crawl requests for entire subfolders affected and B. Inability for Google to index new content from the subfolders quickly enough to rank in Discover (6)

— Eva (@evalangelotti) April 14, 2022

My hypothesis being that because nav links were added at scale, Googlebot wasn’t crawling and indexing new content quickly enough to rank it in Discover. The 170 new links at the top of each page made it more difficult for G to index based on user intent / topic / entity etc.

— Eva (@evalangelotti) April 14, 2022

Is this a hypothetical situation, or something specific on your site? If it’s something you’re seeing, I’d assume it’s unrelated.

— 🦙 johnmu.xml (personal) 🦙 (@JohnMu) April 14, 2022

I’d still go with “unrelated”. As mentioned in our docs at https://t.co/kkA2QTzIJs “Given the serendipitous nature of Discover, traffic from Discover is less predictable or dependable when compared to Search, and is considered supplemental to your Search traffic.”

— 🦙 johnmu.xml (personal) 🦙 (@JohnMu) April 14, 2022

Forum discussion at Twitter.