Google Search Console Tips

The backlink data in Search Console is a sampled set of backlinks which Google considers to be more relevant. For small sites, this might include all the backlinks. The data includes links which are nofollowed and may have been disavowed.

If you canonicalise domain variants (www/non-www/http/https), all of the backlinks will be reported in Search Console under the canonical domain.

The rankings reported in Search Console include results for personalised search.

Site: is not an accurate measure of indexed pages, and could be off by ‘orders of magnitude’. The Sitemap Index count in Search Console is accurate for the specific URLs submitted.

Google has removed the Remove Sitelink option in Search Console, as they had demoted the power of it, so you cannot remove them directly in any way. But you can change your internal linking, a clean navigation in particular, to promote pages, and use a noindex to remove any pages from Google’s index completely.

Using Fetch as Googlebot doesn’t update the Google index. You have to use the submit to Index function.

You can submit Sitemaps with URLs on a different domain if both of the site are verified in the Search Console account.

Search Console indexed pages in Sitemaps uses exact URLs, so variations including www/non-www, trailing slash variations, etc, won’t be reported as indexed.

If you are using a CDN, you can add this to Search Console.

The priority metric for crawl errors in search console is a mixture of pages being returned in search results, included in Sitemaps, and if it has internal links. The higher the priority are the ones Google thinks might have content which Google wants to index.