Tag Archives: webmaster tools

Google Search News: coming soon to a screen near you

The world of search is constantly evolving. New tools, opportunities, and features are regularly arriving, sometimes existing things change, and sometimes we say goodbye to some things to make way for the new. To help you stay on top of things, we've started a new YouTube series called Google Search News.

With Google Search News, we want to give you a regular & short summary of what's been happening around Google Search, specifically for SEOs, publishers, developers, and webmasters. The first episode is out now, so check it out. 

(The first episode, now on your screen)

In this first episode, we cover:

We plan to make these updates regularly, and adjust the format over time as needed. Let us know what you think in the video comments!

Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Switzerland

Minor cleaning up in the Search Console API

With the move to the new Search Console, we've decided to clean up some parts of the Search Console API as well. In the Search Analytics API, going forward we'll no longer support these Android app search appearance types:

  • Is Install
  • Is App Universal
  • Is Opened

Since these appearance types are no longer used in the UI, they haven't been populated with data recently. Going forward, we won't be showing these types at all through the API. 

Additionally, for the Sitemaps API, we're no longer populating data on indexing status of submitted sitemap files in the "Indexed" field.

We're still committed to the Search Console API. In particular, we're working on updating the Search Console API to the new Search Console. We don't have any specific timeframes to share at the moment, but stay tuned to find out more!


Posted by Ziv Hodak, Search Console product manager

Googlebot evergreen rendering in our testing tools

Today we updated most of our testing tools so they are using the evergreen Chromium renderer. This affects our testing tools like the mobile-friendly test or the URL inspection tool in Search Console. In this post we look into what this means and what went into making this update happen.

The evergreen Chromium renderer

At Google I/O this year we were happy to announce the new evergreen Googlebot.

At its core the update is a switch from Chrome 41 as the rendering engine to the latest stable Chromium. Googlebot is now using the latest stable Chromium to run JavaScript and render pages. We will continue to update Googlebot along with the stable Chromium, hence we call it "evergreen".

Comparison between the rendering of a JS-powered website in the old and new Googlebot
A JavaScript-powered demo website staying blank in the old Googlebot but working fine in the new Googlebot.

What this means for your websites

We are very happy to bring the latest features of the web platform not only to Googlebot but to the tools that let you see what Googlebot sees as well. This means websites using ES6+, Web Components and 1000+ new web platform features are now rendered with the latest stable Chromium, both in Googlebot and our testing tools.
A comparison showing the old and the new mobile-friendly test. The old mobile-friendly test rendered a blank page and the new one renders the page correctly
While the previous version of the mobile-friendly test doesn't show the page content, the new version does.

What the update changes in our testing tools

Our testing tools reflect how Googlebot processes your pages as closely as possible. With the update to the new Googlebot, we had to update them to use the same renderer as Googlebot.

The change will affect the rendering within the following tools:
We tested these updates and based on the feedback we have switched the tools listed previously to the new evergreen Googlebot. A lot of the feedback came from Googlers and the community. Product Experts and Google Developer Experts helped us make sure the update works well.

Note: The new Googlebot still uses the same user agent as before the update. There will be more information about an update to the user agent in the near future. For now, Googlebot's user agent and the user agent used in the testing tools does not change.

We are excited about this update and are looking forward to your feedback and questions on Twitter, the webmaster forum or in our webmaster office hours.

Posted by Zoe Clifford, Software Engineer in the Web Rendering Service team & Martin Splitt, friendly internet fairy at Google WTA

Search Console reporting for your site’s Discover performance data

Discover is a popular way for users to stay up-to-date on all their favorite topics, even when they’re not searching. To provide publishers and sites visibility into their Discover traffic, we're adding a new report in Google Search Console to share relevant statistics and help answer questions such as:

  • How often is my site shown in users' Discover? How large is my traffic?
  • Which pieces of content perform well in Discover?
  • How does my content perform differently in Discover compared to traditional search results?

A quick reminder: What is Discover?

Discover is a feature within Google Search that helps users stay up-to-date on all their favorite topics, without needing a query. Users get to their Discover experience in the Google app, on the Google.com mobile homepage, and by swiping right from the homescreen on Pixel phones. It has grown significantly since launching in 2017 and now helps more than 800M monthly active users get inspired and explore new information by surfacing articles, videos, and other content on topics they care most about. Users have the ability to follow topics directly or let Google know if they’d like to see more or less of a specific topic. In addition, Discover isn’t limited to what’s new. It surfaces the best of the web regardless of publication date, from recipes and human interest stories, to fashion videos and more. Here is our guide on how you can optimize your site for Discover.

Discover in Search Console

The new Discover report is shown to websites that have accumulated meaningful visibility in Discover, with the data shown back to March 2019. We hope this report is helpful in thinking about how you might optimize your content strategy to help users discover engaging information-- both new and evergreen.

For questions or comments on the report, feel free to drop by our webmaster help forums, or contact us through our other channels.

Posted by Michael Huzman, Ariel Kroszynski

Announcing domain-wide data in Search Console

Google recommends verifying all versions of a website -- http, https, www, and non-www -- in order to get the most comprehensive view of your site in Google Search Console. Unfortunately, many separate listings can make it hard for webmasters to understand the full picture of how Google “sees” their domain as a whole. To make this easier, today we're announcing "domain properties" in Search Console, a way of verifying and seeing the data from Google Search for a whole domain.

Domain properties show data for all URLs under the domain name, including all protocols, subdomains, and paths. They give you a complete view of your website across Search Console, reducing the need to manually combine data. So regardless of whether you use m-dot URLs for mobile pages, or are (finally) getting the migration to HTTPS set up, Search Console will be able to help with a complete view of your site's data with regards to how Google Search sees it.

If you already have DNS verification set up, Search Console will automatically create new domain properties for you over the next few weeks, with data over all reports. Otherwise, to add a new domain property, go to the property selector, add a new domain property, and use DNS verification.We recommend using domain properties where possible going forward.

Domain properties were built based on your feedback; thank you again for everything you've sent our way over the years! We hope this makes it easier to manage your site, and to get a complete overview without having to manually combine data. Should you have any questions, feel free to drop by our help forums, or leave us a comment on Twitter. And as always, you can also use the feedback feature built in to Search Console as well.


Posted by Erez Bixon, Search Console Team

Consolidating your website traffic on canonical URLs

In Search Console, the Performance report currently credits all page metrics to the exact URL that the user is referred to by Google Search. Although this provides very specific data, it makes property management more difficult; for example: if your site has mobile and desktop versions on different properties, you must open multiple properties to see all your Search data for the same piece of content.

To help unify your data, Search Console will soon begin assigning search metrics to the (Google-selected) canonical URL, rather than the URL referred to by Google Search. This change has several benefits:

  • It unifies all search metrics for a single piece of content into a single URL: the canonical URL. This shows you the full picture about a specific piece of content in one property.
  • For users with separate mobile or AMP pages, it unifies all (or most, since some mobile URLs may end up as canonical) of your data to a single property (the "canonical" property).
  • It improves the usability of the AMP and Mobile-Friendly reports. These reports currently show issues in the canonical page property, but show the impression in the property that owns the actual URL referred to by Google Search. After this change, the impressions and issues will be shown in the same property.

When will this happen?

We plan to transition all performance data on April 10, 2019. In order to provide continuity to your data, we will pre-populate your unified data beginning from January 2018. We will also enable you to view both old and new versions for a few weeks during the transition to see the impact and understand the differences.

API and Data Studio users: The Search Console API will change to canonical data on April 10, 2019.

How will this affect my data?

  • At an individual URL level, you will see traffic shift from any non-canonical (duplicate) URLs to the canonical URL.
  • At the property level, you will see data from your alternate property (for example, your mobile site) shifted to your "canonical property". Your alternate property traffic probably won't drop to zero in Search Console because canonicalization is at the page, not the property level, and your mobile property might have some canonical pages. However, for most users, most property-level data will shift to one property. AMP property traffic will drop to zero in most cases (except for self-canonical pages).
  • You will still be able to filter data by device, search appearance (such as AMP), country, and other dimensions without losing important information about your traffic.

You can see some examples of these traffic changes below.

Preparing for the change

  • Consider whether you need to change user access to your various properties; for example: do you need to add new users to your canonical property, or do existing users continue to need access to the non-canonical properties.
  • Modify any custom traffic reports you might have created in order to adapt for this traffic shift.
  • If you need to learn the canonical URL for a given URL, you can use the URL Inspection tool.
  • If you want to save your traffic data calculated using the current system, you should download your data using either the Performance report's Export Data button, or using the Search Console API.

Examples

Here are a few examples showing how data might change on your site. In these examples, you can see how your traffic numbers would change between a canonical site (called example.com) and alternate site (called m.example.com).

Important: In these examples, the desktop site contains all the canonical pages and the mobile contains all the alternate pages. In the real world, your desktop site might contain some alternate pages and your mobile site might contain some canonical pages. You can determine the canonical for a given URL using the URL Inspection tool.

Total traffic

In the current version, some of your traffic is attributed to the canonical property and some to the alternate property. The new version should attribute all of your traffic to the canonical property.


Canonical property
(http://example.com) 		Alternate property
(http://m.example.com)
Current

New, based on canonical URLs

Change +0.7K     |        +3K -0.7K        |          -3K

Individual page traffic

You can see traffic changes between the duplicate and canonical URLs for individual pages in the Pages view. The next example shows how traffic that used to be split between the canonical and alternate pages are now all attributed to the canonical URL:


Canonical property
(http://example.com) 		Alternate property
(http://m.example.com)

Old

New

Change

+150     |        +800

-150     |        -800

Mobile traffic

In the current version, all of your mobile traffic was attributed to your m. property. The new version attributes all traffic to your canonical property when you apply the "Device: Mobile" filter as shown here:


Canonical property
(http://example.com) 		Alternate property
(http://m.example.com)

Old

New

Change

+0.7K      | +3K

-0.7K      | -3K

In conclusion

We know that this change might seem a little confusing at first, but we're confident that it will simplify your job of tracking traffic data for your site. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out on the Webmaster Help Forum.


Posted by John Mueller, Developer Advocate, Zurich

Focusing on the new Search Console

Over the last year, the new Search Console has been growing and growing, with the goal of making it easier for site owners to focus on the important tasks. For us, focus means being able to put in all our work into the new Search Console, being committed to the users, and with that, being able to turn off some of the older, perhaps already-improved, aspects of the old Search Console. This gives us space to further build out the new Search Console, adding and improving features over time.

Here are some of the upcoming changes in Search Console that we're planning on making towards end of March, 2019:

Crawl errors in the new Index Coverage report

One of the more common pieces of feedback we received was that the list of crawl errors in Search Console was not actionable when it came to setting priorities (it's normal that Google crawls URLs which don't exist, it's not something that needs to be fixed on the website). By changing the focus on issues and patterns used for site indexing, we believe that site owners will be able to find and fix issues much faster (and when issues are fixed, you can request reprocessing quickly too). With this, we're going to remove the old Crawl Errors report - for desktop, smartphone, and site-wide errors. We'll continue to improve the way issues are recognized and flagged, so if there's something that would help you, please submit feedback in the tools.

Along with the Crawl Errors report, we're also deprecating the crawl errors API that's based on the same internal systems. At the moment, we don't have a replacement for this API. We'll inform API users of this change directly.

Sitemaps data in Index Coverage

As we move forward with the new Search Console, we're turning the old sitemaps report off. The new sitemaps report has most of the functionality of the old report, and we're aiming to bring the rest of the information - specifically for images & video - to the new reports over time. Moreover, to track URLs submitted in sitemap files, within the Index Coverage report you can select and filter using your sitemap files. This makes it easier to focus on URLs that you care about.

Using the URL inspection tool to fetch as Google

The new URL inspection tool offers many ways to check and review URLs on your website. It provides both a look into the current indexing, as well as a live check of URLs that you've recently changed. In the meantime, this tool shows even more information on URLs, such as the HTTP headers, page resource, the JavaScript console log, and a screenshot of the page. From there, you can also submit pages for re-processing, to have them added or updated in our search results as quickly as possible.

User-management is now in settings

We've improved the user management interface and decreased clutter from the tool by merging it with the Settings section of the new Search Console. This replaces the user-management features in the old Search Console.

Structured data dashboard to dedicated reports per vertical

To help you implement Rich Results for you site, we added several reports to the new Search Console last year. These include Jobs, Recipes, Events and Q&A. We are committed to keep adding reports like these to the new Search Console. When Google encounters a syntax error parsing Structured Data on a page, it will also be reported in aggregate to make sure you don’t miss anything critical.

Other Structured Data types that are not supported with Rich Results features, will not be reported in Search Console anymore. We hope this reduces distraction from non-critical issues, and help you to focus on fixing problems which could be visible in Search.

Letting go of some old features

With the focus on features that we believe are critical to site owners, we've had to make a hard decision to drop some features in Search Console. In particular:

HTML suggestions - finding short and duplicated titles can be useful for site owners, but Google's algorithms have gotten better at showing and improving titles over the years. We still believe this is something useful for sites to look into, and there are some really good tools that help you to crawl your website to extract titles & descriptions too.

Property Sets - while they're loved by some site owners, the small number of users makes it hard to justify maintaining this feature. However, we did learn that users need a more comprehensive view of their website and so we will soon add the option of managing a search console account over an entire domain (regardless of schema type and sub-domains). Stay tuned!

Android Apps - most of the relevant functionality has been moved to the Firebase console over the years.

Blocked resources - we added this functionality to help sites with unblocking of CSS and JavaScript files for mobile-friendliness several years back. In the meantime, these issues have gotten much fewer, the usage of this tool has dropped significantly, and you're able to find blocked resources directly in the URL inspection tool.

Please send us feedback!

We realize some of these changes will affect your work-flows, so we want to let you know about them as early as possible. Please send us your feedback directly in the new Search Console, if there are aspects which are unclear, or which would ideally be different for your use-case. For more detailed feedback, please use our help forums, feel free to include screenshots & ideas. In the long run, we believe the new Search Console will make things much easier, help you focus on the issues affecting your site, and the opportunities available to your site, with regards to search.

We're looking forward to an exciting year!


Posted by Hillel Maoz, Search Console Team

The new Search Console is graduating out of Beta ?

Today we mark an important milestone in Search Console’s history: we are graduating the new Search Console out of beta! With this graduation we are also launching the Manual Actions report and a “Test Live” capability to the recently launched URL inspection tool, which are joining a stream of reports and features we launched in the new Search Console over the past few months.

Our journey to the new Search Console

We launched the new Search Console at the beginning of the year. Since then we have been busy hearing and responding to your feedback, adding new features such as the URL Inspection Tool, and migrating key reports and features. Here's what the new Search Console gives you:

More data:

  • Get an accurate view of your website content using the Index Coverage report.
  • Review your Search Analytics data going back 16 months in the Performance report.
  • See information on links pointing to your site and within your site using the Links report.
  • Retrieve crawling, indexing, and serving information for any URL directly from the Google index using the URL Inspection Tool.

Better alerting and new "fixed it" flows:

  • Get automatic alerts and see a listing of pages affected by Crawling, Indexing, AMP, Mobile Usability, Recipes, or Job posting issues.
  • Reports now show the HTML code where we think a fix necessary (if applicable).
  • Share information quickly with the relevant people in your organization to drive the fix.
  • Notify Google when you've fixed an issue. We will review your pages, validate whether the issue is fixed, and return a detailed log of the validation findings.

Simplified sitemaps and account settings management:

Out of Beta

While the old Search Console still has some features that are not yet available in the new one, we believe that the most common use cases are supported, in an improved way, in the new Search Console. When an equivalent feature exists in both old and new Search Console, our messages will point users to the new version. We'll also add a reminder link in the old report. After a reasonable period, we will remove the old report.

Read more about how to migrate from old to the new Search Console, including a list of improved reports and how to perform common tasks, in our help center.

Manual Actions and Security Issues alerts

To ensure that you don't miss any critical alerts for your site, active manual actions and security issues will be shown directly on the Overview page in the new console. In addition, the Manual Actions report has gotten a fresher look in the new Search Console. From there, you can review the details for any pending Manual Action and, if needed, file a reconsideration request.

URL Inspection - Live mode and request indexing

The URL inspection tool that we launched a few months ago now enables you to run the inspection on the live version of the page. This is useful for debugging and fixing issues in a page or confirming whether a reported issue still exists in a page. If the issue is fixed on the live version of the page, you can ask Google to recrawl and index the page.

We're not finished yet!

Your feedback is important to us! As we evolve Search Console, your feedback helps us to tune our efforts. You can still switch between the old and new products easily, so any missing functionality you need is just a few clicks away. We will continue working on moving more reports and tools as well as adding exciting new capabilities to the new Search Console.


Posted by Hillel Maoz and Yinnon Haviv, Engineering Leads, Search Console team

Collaboration and user management in the new Search Console

As part of our reinvention of Search Console, we have been rethinking the models of facilitating cooperation and accountability for our users. We decided to redesign the product around cooperative team usage and transparency of action history. The new Search Console will gradually provide better history tracking to show who performed which significant property-affecting modifications, such as changing a setting, validating an issue or submitting a new sitemap. In that spirit we also plan to enable all users to see critical site messages.

New features

  • User management is now an integral part of Search Console.
  • The new Search Console enables you to share a read-only view of many reports, including Index coverage, AMP, and Mobile Usability. Learn more.
  • A new user management interface that enables all users to see and (if appropriate), manage user roles for all property users.

New Role definition

  • In order to provide a simpler permission model, we are planning to limit the "restricted" user role to read-only status. While being able to see all information, read-only users will no longer be able to perform any state-changing actions, including starting a fix validation or sharing an issue.

Best practices

As a reminder, here are some best practices for managing user permissions in Search Console:

User feedback

As part of our Beta exploration, we released visibility of the user management interface to all user roles. Some users reached out to request more time to prepare for the updated user management model, including the ability of restricted and full users to easily see a list of other collaborators on the site. We’ve taken that feedback and will hold off on that part of the launch. Stay tuned for more updates relating to collaboration tools and changes on our permission models.

As always, we love to hear feedback from our users. Feel free to use the feedback form within Search Console, and we welcome your discussions in our help forums as well!


Posted by John Mueller, Google Switzerland

Links, Mobile Usability, and site management in the new Search Console

More features are coming to the new Search Console. This time we've focused on importing existing popular features from the old Search Console to the new product.

Links Report

Search Console users value the ability to see links to and within their site, as Google Search sees them. Today, we are rolling out the new Links report, which combines the functionality of the “Links to your site” and “Internal Links” reports on the old Search Console. We hope you find this useful!

Mobile Usability report

Mobile Usability is an important priority for all site owners. In order to help site owners with fixing mobile usability issues, we launched the Mobile Usability report on the new Search Console. Issue names are the same as in the old report but we now allow users to submit a validation and reindexing request when an issue is fixed, similar to other reports in the new Search Console.

Site and user management

To make the new Search Console feel more like home, we’ve added the ability to add and verify new sites, and manage your property's users and permissions, directly in new Search Console using our newly added settings page.

Keep sending feedback

As always, we would love to get your feedback through the tools directly and our help forums so please share and let us know how we're doing.


Posted by Ariel Kroszynski and Roman Kecher - Search Console engineers