Google Search Console Tips

It takes some time to report crawl errors in Search Console, and detect when they have updated, potentially up to a year for some URLs.

The URL removal tool in Search Console to hide individual pages from appearing in search results but doesn’t stop them being indexed. You can also use to the tool to remove all URLs under a shared path. You shouldn’t use the tool for general maintenance, only for something critical you want removed as quickly as possible.

If you add session IDs as a separate parameter instead of a semi-colon, then they can be managed more easily with the Search Console Parameter handling tool

Sitemap Index counts report the exact URL you sumbit including trailing slashes. If Google chooses to index a different copy of the same page, the submitted URL wouldn’t be reported as indexed.

Google includes nofollowed links in the Search Console backlinks data to discourage a focus on followed links, and help you understand which content is generating the most links.

Until pages have been recrawled, you might see hreflang ‘no return hreflang’ errors in search console for hreflang data added to a Sitemap.

Any manual penalties from migrated domains which are affecting your new domain will be visible in the Manual Actions report in search console.

The message in search results saying ‘Your site isn’t mobile friendly’ is only displayed to webmasters with the site verified in Search Console.

Use 2 more unrelated verification methods so that if one fails, the other methods will still work.

In a property set, if multiple sites are ranking independently for the same keyword, Google only registers an impression and takes the ranking for highest ranking site.