The Google Search Console is evolving at a rapid pace. Here is what you need to know about all the latest features.
Google Search Console updates are getting faster and faster. Even for the most eagle-eyed of SEO professionals, it can be difficult to keep on top of all the latest developments.
As such, I felt it would be helpful to provide an easy-to-digest overview of what we know about Google's plans to migrate features from the older version, as well as the new version of Search Console Will also see development.
I want to keep this post updated with the latest releases and developments, but if I don't remember anything, don't hesitate to leave me a message.
What happened in the new Search Console?
The main source of confusion about the new version of Search Console is how Google is dealing with the transition from the old version, as not all features are being moved directly to the new version.
Instead, Google is taking the opportunity to reproduce the tools and reports they provide to be more useful to users and to more closely align with the challenges facing SEO professionals.
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After some information and information on what's going on and what's not for the new version, Google has published a post clarifying their plans. As they stand, Google's plans are an extension
Shiny new reports and tools
Performance reports
The performance report has been around for about a year now and was the first feature to be launched in the beta version of the search console.
With the sexy new UI, the biggest benefit of performance reports compared to older search analytics reports is the extension of the date range to include 16 months of data instead of 3 months.
The performance report provides click, impression, CTR, and average ranking metrics at the page, query, country, and device levels.
What does it replace?
Search analytics.
How can it be improved?
Although the performance report has been a welcome addition, it is not without its flaws. I hope that we will see more updates once the migration to the new version is complete.
Here are some ways by which it can be improved:
Trending: 16 months of organic search data is great and all, but when you cannot collect data beyond the daily default data points, it is difficult to establish trends. For example, we have doubled organic clicks on the Deep Crawl site over the past 12 months, yet the graph in the performance report for that period does not explicitly tell that story. Being able to toggle between daily, weekly, and monthly aggregation is an additional sum.
Date Comparison: Setting custom comparative date ranges makes sense because you need to use four different calendar selectors. This can be improved by using something similar to Google Analytics, using a calendar selector.
Filtering: Performance reports are a gold mine for organic insights, but it is repetitive and time-consuming to set the required filters every time you re-enter Search Console. I'd really like to see some more customizations introduced in the Search Console. This would be helpful if you were able to save the filtered reports and pin them to the overview page. Dashboarding platforms like Data Studio have a lot of value in pulling search console data, but not everyone has time for it, so Google needs to make it as easy as possible to extract insights.
Index coverage report
Launched with performance reports at the time of the birth of the new version of Search Console, the index coverage report is a welcome development of crawl errors and index status reports.
The new index coverage report provides site-level insights about crawling and indexing issues.
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This report will provide trends on submitted pages (eg page 404s submitted, blocked by robots.txt, marked noindex, etc.) as well as indexed (valid) pages in the sitemap.
What does it replace?
Index status and crawl errors.
How can it be improved?
The index coverage report is a useful component to the search console suite because it enables you to get a top-level view of crawling and indexing issues directly from Google. However, this is not without its limitations:
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Limited lines: When you dig into issues marked by index coverage you are limited to 1,000 lines of URL. While 1,000 pages
will provide more than enough examples to diagnose and fix problems on most sites, it can make things difficult for large sites with millions of pages.
UnclearExplanation: explain some of Google's issues, which the flag can be frustratingly vague. For example, the description of the “Crawled – currently not indexed” issue is described as follows: “The page was crawled by Google, but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling.”It’s difficult to understand what could be causing these pages not to be indexed, perhaps it’s a quality issue. In these cases, it is often worth using the URL Inspection tool for the flagged pages to conduct a deeper investigation.
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