Hey everyone in the community,
I really need some advice from people who are getting regular Google Discover traffic. I spent the last few days creating 12 Web Stories using Make Story 2.0 for my travel blog. Each story has 8 to 10 slides, good quality background photos, clean text, and swipe-up links pointing to my blog articles.
I published all 12 stories directly using the top dropdown button on Blogger. In my Google Search Console, all 12 URLs are crawled and indexed without any AMP errors. When I test the URLs, Search Console says "URL is on Google".
Here is the issue: It has been 5 days and Discover impressions are sitting at exactly 0.
In fact, the entire Discover tab has not even appeared on my Search Console menu yet. I see other blogs in my niche pulling thousands of visits from Discover every morning. Am I missing a mandatory setting inside MakeStory before publishing? Any help would be appreciated.
Comments (5)
Zero Discover traffic on 12 Web Stories published through MakeStory 2.0 - what am I missing?
A lot of people take a vertical phone screenshot (9:16) of their first slide and paste that as the poster image. Google will index that story on normal web search, but the Discover feed will quietly disqualify it.
Google Discover requires a 4:3 aspect ratio poster image (around 1200x900 or 640x480).
Here is how to fix it in MakeStory:
1. Open your story in Make Story 2.0.
2. Look at the right sidebar under Story Settings.
3. Paste a 1200x900 landscape image link into the Poster Image box.
4. Also check your Publisher Logo in that same panel - it must be a square (1:1) PNG or WebP image at least 96x96px.
5. Click Publish Story from the top menu to overwrite your page.
I literally took a tall 720x1280 screenshot of slide 1 and used that because I thought Discover only wanted vertical images! That explains everything.
Going to resize all 12 poster images in Canva right now and update the pages.
If you uploaded background images to your own Google Drive and pasted the links manually, open your story URL in an Incognito window on your browser.
If any slide background shows up completely black or broken, Googlebot cannot fetch the image because your Drive folder is set to private. Make sure the folder permission is set to "Anyone with the link can view".
I resized all poster images to 1200x900, verified my logo was 96x96, and submitted the links through the workspace Indexing API Tool.
Checked Search Console after 4 days and the Discover tab finally showed up! One of my stories on Goa beaches got 4,200 impressions and 310 clicks in the last 24 hours.
Thank you so much @priya_web and @tech_deepak!