Google Search Console Tips

If you migrate from HTTP to HTTPS, you need to have both verified in Webmaster Tools and set up a redirect, but you don’t need to use the change of address tool which is only for moving between different domains.

Manual penalties will show up in Webmaster Tools, and will expire naturally after an amount of time. Algorithmic penalties are only updated when the algorithm and data is refreshed, or the algorithm is retired.

Search Console will report pages as having duplicate titles, even if they have been canonicalised

The Soft 404 errors report in Webmaster Tools is a good way of identifying thin pages which Google don’t think have any original content.

Only manual Google penalties are shown in Webmaster Tools. They can be applied to a single subdomain, or all subdomains of a domain. They are removed automatically after a fixed period.

If you change many URLs, you should submit a sitemap with the old URLs to Google which will help them pick up the redirects to the new URLs. Webmaster tools will report errors with the sitemap, because it only contains redirecting URLs, but this is fine.

In Webmaster Tools, you need to verify all combinations of your domain. e.g. www/non-www, http/https in order to see all the backlinks.

Backlinks reported in Webmaster Tools come directly from the Googebot web crawling process, give or take a few days delay.