Google Search Console Tips

Manual action penalties are specific to www/non-www and HTTP/HTTPS domains so you need to have them all set up in Search Console to see them.

Google will remember your 404 URLs for a long time, and periodically recrawl them to see if they are still 404. These will be reported in search console, but are perfectly fine.

Some search console reports are based on a significant sample of the primary URLs, and won’t include every possible URL. e.g. Structured data and AMP reports.

URL Parameter settings in Search Console are a hint for Google, and they will validate them periodically. The Robots.txt disallow overrides the parameter removal, so it’s better to use the parameter tool to consolidate duplicate pages instead of disallow.

Separate mobile sites should be canonicalising to the desktop page, so you don’t need to submit them to Google via a Sitemap, but it’s still worth adding to Search Console.

If you have a generic top-level domain which doesn’t specify a country, and you use a CDN, you should make sure you have the geographic settings applied in Search Console.

If Google discovers a part of your site with a large number of new URLs, it may queue the URLs, generate a Search Console error, but continue to crawl the queued URLs over an extended period.

If you’re specifying a path in the robots.txt file, you must start with a slash, not a * wildcard. This was always true, but was only recently added to the documentation and Search Console testing tool.

The Search Console impression and clicks data includes universal search results like images which might be misleading.

If you have some kind of overlay or pop-up on landing pages, you can check what it looks like to Googlebot using the Fetch and Render tool in Search Console, and check the impact on engagement using web analytics.