Google Search Console Tips

New version of Search Console will be a mix of data and UI updates. Google have been looking at including different data as well as the amount of data.

Search Console makes some simplifications in its reporting giving relevant sample of the pages Google has indexed. They do this because most sites have many URLs that are indexed but never shown in search. John recommends not to use the counts in Search Console Reports as an absolute count of all of the pages that are indexed but look more at how issues trend over time.

Updating of HTML Improvements in Search Console is dependent on crawl frequency of the website. John recommends using this report to get an idea of what you could be working on your site but not as a checklist you need to get down to zero issues.

Disallowed pages may take a while to be dropped from the index if aren’t crawled very frequently. For critical issues, you can temporarily remove URLs from search results using Search Console.

HTML Improvements in Search Console are generated when pages are initially crawled, but before a canonical tag is processed so they can be ignored for canonicalised pages.

Google won’t notify sites when they have been switched over to mobile-first indexing, but will consider sending messages via Search Console to help with any issues.

The links data in Search Console but it may take Google up to a year to re-crawl pages to find new and removed links.

Google recommends to add all variations of your domain to Search Console so they can notify you in the event of errors and to see data about which versions are appearing in search results.

Query level reports in Search Console Analytics may filter out some impressions so they won’t add up to the totals.

The Index Status data in Search Console is updated 2-3 times a week.