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Google Search Console Tips

Google Search Console (previously called Webmaster Tools) is a free tool provided by Google for website owners to monitor performance and traffic. GSC also offers search engine optimization recommendations and fixes. Our SEO Office Hours recaps below cover a range of advice from Google to help you better understand and get the most out of this fundamental SEO tool.

GSC Live Test Doesn’t Always Reflect How Pages Are Rendered for Indexing Purposes

An ‘other error’ occurs in Google Search Console live tests when it doesn’t get around to fetching the URL in that particular test, for example a resource file. When crawling a page for indexing purposes Google will spend more time fetching and caching the embedded URLs in order to be able to render them properly.

24 Jan 2020

URLs Appearing in the Side Bar Knowledge Panel of Search Results Will Be Classed as Position 10 or 11

Google may sometimes display a result in the right sidebar, which is a mix between a knowledge panel and featured snippet. John expects this page will be seen by Google Search Console as position 10 or 11, because it is classed as being in the second column of search results.

24 Jan 2020

There is No Change to the Position Shown For URLs in Featured Snippets within GSC

GSC uses the top-most position of a URL to show as the average in the Performance reports. This hasn’t changed despite the update to how featured snippets are displayed, so if your page is shown in a featured snippet, the position shown will remain the same. However, if you no longer have the featured snippet then the position of the traditional search result will be used instead.

24 Jan 2020

Site: & Other Unnatural Queries Can Be Dropped From GSC Performance Reports

Unnatural searches like site: queries can be removed from Google Search Console performance reports, and often wouldn’t appear there anyway due to the small amounts of people that use them.

7 Jan 2020

Average Position in GSC Can Vary Depending on Whether Viewed on Per-URL or Per-Query Basis

The average position in Google Search Console is calculated on both a per-URL and per-query basis. This data can seem inconsistent in some cases, for example, URLs in sitelinks within the top result will be counted as position 1 from a query perspective, but not from a URL perspective.

7 Jan 2020

There Will Be Differences Between Counts in GSC & Google Analytics

Search Console tracks things differently than Google Analytics does, so John expects there will be some difference between the metric counts in both. This is because GSC tracks what users click on when visiting a website, while Analytics tracks site visits differently, in particular when redirects are used.

27 Dec 2019

Aggregate Reports in GSC Focus On A Sample Number of URLs

The aggregate reports in search console, for example mobile usability, AMP and rich results, focus on a sample of URLs from a site. In comparison, the coverage report includes all of the indexed URLs and this means it can be difficult to compare the total numbers seen across all of the reports. E.g. the coverage report may show 4,000 valid indexed pages, while in the mobile usability report the total may only be 2,000 valid pages, as this is the sample size taken.

26 Nov 2019

Use GSC and Server Logs to Understand Your Site’s Crawl Budget

John recommends two approaches for understanding a site’s crawl budget, one of these is looking at the speed at which Google was able to download individual pages, which can be found in GSC. If this is high it may indicate that Google have crawled as much as they could, but may have missed some pages. The other aspect is server errors, as they can impact the ability to crawl the site. Reviewing server logs will allow you to identify if server errors are occuring.

26 Nov 2019

Discrepencies Between Crawl Stats in GSC & Log Files Are Normal

In the Google Search Console crawl stats report, all of the access calls which go through the infrastructure that Googlebot uses will be included. This includes Googlebot crawling and rendering as well as robots.txt and sitemap access. John informed that while the crawl stats are useful, it can be difficult to compare them with log files.

26 Nov 2019

GSC Speed Reports May Not Contain Data for Small Sites

Search Console speed reports are based on Chrome User Experience data, which is real-world data from users. Therefore, for smaller sites, Google may not have enough data to make a meaningful judgment on speed metrics.

15 Nov 2019

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