Google have recently updated issue categorisation in Search Console for webmasters and SEOs. Google’s coverage report is a very helpful area of the Google Search Console reporting suite to provide insight into the broad but critical area of content quality. This handy report assists SEOs with looking at website architecture and has had some nice enhancements to it. It’s fair to say that the more progressive SEOs understand the importance of these datasets and that a key part of ongoing, ‘business-as-usual’ SEO is managing the indexation patterns highlighted within Google Search Console.
Not indexed/indexed roll-up
Google aggregates the total not indexed vs. indexed in the initial page, with a reference to the total number of ‘reasons’ as to why pages are not indexed:
The ‘ticks’ then toggle the tracking of not indexed vs. indexed over time
Filter by sitemap
Learn about the effectiveness of sitemaps uploaded to Google Search Console with the simple filter.
Review not indexed ‘reason by source’
In this section you can see what isn’t indexed and why. ‘Source’ is a new column in this section, whereby Google highlights whether ‘Google systems’ or ‘Website’ is the origin of the potential issue. ‘Website’ might relate to the use of things like redirection (or lack of), canonicalisation or use of noindex tags – whereas ‘Google systems’ might be where Google has either ignored URLs or prioritised other URLs than the ones you’ve canonicaled to.
FAQs about the August 2022 updates to Google Search Console reporting
What areas has Google updated?
Google Search Console has updated the following areas:
- Coverage (Page indexing)
- Core Web Vitals (Poor/Need improvement/Good categories retained, but pages grouped into good and not-good tables)
- Mobile Usability
- AMP report
- Rich result reports (Events, Fact checks, Logos, and so on)
- URL Inspection
- Search Console API
What is new about the coverage report in Google Search Console?
The coverage report section has a new ‘source’ column and Google has rolled up excluded/error pages to ‘not indexed’ and valid/valid with a warning to ‘indexed’ to give webmasters a neat black and white top-line view.
This is summarised here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/11510493#coverage
Duncan Colman
