In the past couple of days, Google has issued a number of manual actions around Google Discover policy violations. Just to be clear, you may have seen your Google Discover traffic drop with the August core update, and this policy violation notice would be unrelated to that. Google issued manual actions manually (but in batches) and Google never sends notices like this for algorthmic updates.
The Google August core update started almost two weeks ago. If you noticed your Google Discover traffic drop then, it is related to that.
If you received a manual action in the past day or so, and then your Discover traffic dropped even more, then it is related to the manual action. It can be true that your site was hit by both and you noticed traffic declines from Discover with the August core update and then you got this notice - that does happen.
Gagan Ghotra posted on X saying, "Google is issuing Discover policy violations today. We got this for 7 publishers today - although I can't share site URLs. But for all of the sample violating URLs which Google is highlighting - its a catchy headline/title which is a common practice to get better CTR from Discover."
Here is a screenshot of one of those violations:
This specific one is over the "Misleading content: We do not allow content that misleads users into engaging with it by promising details that are not reflected in the content." That policy can be found here. The specific policy is not new, it has been around for some time.
There are tons of complaints about Discover traffic dropping over the past couple of weeks. Again, most are probably related to the core update, as we know core updates impact Discover traffic, and AI overviews, and many other features.
Not sure what to say about this because personally I don't even like to have crazy headlines/title but that works for getting crazy high CTR from Google Discover ........... https://t.co/exA04FOrDO
— Gagan Ghotra (@gaganghotra_) August 27, 2024
I should note, I have not seen other complaints on social media or in the Google Webmaster Help forums about this. It makes me wonder if this was just him and his sites?
Forum discussion at X.
