Google Seach Console: Best Practices and Trends

Last Updated: 1 year ago by BrodNeil

New Rich Results Status Reports Have Been Added to Google Search Console

For some sites, Google has announced the addition of a new set of detailed mistakes to the rich results reports in the Google Search Console. Users will only see a report if Search Console has data for that type of rich result on your site and if Search Console creates a report for that type of rich result.

Key takeaways:

A summary and a detailed page in the report display the supported rich results’ problems, warnings, and other information.
Google has included a new set of descriptive faults to these reports to assist users in diagnosing difficulties with your rich results.
Ideally, the current error count should be zero on all report pages. The present error, warning, and valid counts are given at the top of the chart.

URL Inspection Tool to Match Google Search Console Testing Tools

According to Google, the URL Inspection tool will be more closely linked with Google Search Console’s public-facing testing capabilities. In addition, Google says it’s changing the “designs and functionalities” of these products, so they’re “completely aligned with the URL Inspection tool.”

This affects the AMP, Mobile Friendly, and Rich Results testing tools. As a result, Google is giving these three public-facing tools a fresh appearance and some new features.

These fields will appear on the public-facing tools as well as the URL inspection tool:

Page availability — Whether Google could crawl the page when it was crawled and any problems it ran into while crawling the URL.
HTTP headers — The response from the inspected URL’s HTTP headers.
Page screenshot — Google’s view of the produced page.
Paired AMP inspection — Inspect both the canonical and AMP URLs with paired AMP inspection.

Why Is Google’s Index Coverage Report So Slow?

According to Google, the Index Coverage Report in Google Search Console does not report up-to-date coverage statistics. For individuals that need the most up-to-date assurance of whether a URL is indexed or not, Google advises utilizing the URL Inspection Tool.

Several tweets have been sent out pointing out what appears to be an error in the Index Coverage Report, which reports that a URL was crawled but not indexed.

It turns out that this is a restriction of the Index Coverage report, not a defect.

Key takeaways:

The data in the Index Coverage report is refreshed at a slower rate than a URL Inspection.
When the URL Inspection results contradict the Index Coverage report, the URL Inspection results should be authoritative.
When the status of a page changes, the data presented in Index Coverage should reflect the new status within a few days.

Google Search Console Website Audit

The Google Search Console tool is a peculiar SEO tool. It appears to be a haphazard collection of search results. Some are useful, some could be beneficial if you know what you’re doing, and still, others are nice to look at but have no genuine insights.

On the plus side, Google Search Console provides accurate data straight from Google. Furthermore, it is available to all website owners for free. So, if you’re motivated enough, and especially if you’re on a budget, you can get a lot of search engine optimization done with only this tool.

This SEO audit guide will go over some of the more valuable Google Search Console features and give you step-by-step instructions on how to use them.