Google Search Console Update: New Structured Data Markups Introduced
By: Dileep Thekkethil | Updated On: December 27, 2023
Table of Contents
If you are a webmaster, Google Search Console is your go-to-tool for understanding how websites are performing on organic search results of Google.
Search Console data helps webmasters to identify errors, penalties, and other issues that can impact the visibility of the website on Google search.
What is Google Search Console?
Hosted by Google,Google Search Console (GSC) is a free web platform for webmasters and digital marketers to monitor the overall performance of their sites relative to Google Search.
Google Search Console provides you with tools and reports to get actionable insights on what interests your target audience, how they find your site online, how your site is performing in Google Search and more.
It gives you an overview of key metrics, including clicks, impressions and your position in Google search,
With Google Search Console, you can easily identify and fix technical issues on your site and ensure that your pages are properly crawled and indexed.
The best part is Google Search Console can send you alerts via email when it spots potential issues on your website. Once you fix the issues, you can notify the same to Google right from the Search Console.
How to Get Started
To set up Google Search Console for your website, head to the official Google Search Console page and click “Start Now”.
Choosing “Domain” will get you a 360-degree view of your site’s performance, including all URLs across all subdomains, on both HTTP and HTTPS.
On the flip side, opting for “URL prefix” allows you to track URLs with a specific prefix. If you want to monitor particular subfolders, for instance, https://blog.yoursite.com/, this is for you.
What if someone else accesses the Google Search Console of your site? Don’t worry. Google has a measure in place to stop that from happening.
That’s why it verifies ownership when you set up GSC for your site initially. The verification process varies for domain and URL prefix.
For domain level verification, you have to add a DNS record in your domain name provider.
Once you’ve added your domain, check if your domain name provider appears in the drop-down menu. If yes, select the same to initiate the automated authorization process.
On the other hand, if you don’t see your domain provider in the drop-down list, you have to copy the TXT record (the characters you see near the copy button) and follow the instructions from your specified domain name provider.
To verify ownership for URL prefix, you can use methods, such as HTML file upload, Google Analytics tracking code, Google Tag Manager container snippet and more.
How to Use Google Search Console Reports and Insights
Once you are all set, the Google Search Console will display an overview of your site’s performance. Performance, Coverage, Experience and Enhancements- these are the key segments that provide you with actionable insights.
To get the Google Search Console data to bolster your website’s performance, you should be familiar with using these reports.
Performance
This section generates performance-based data for four types of Google search, including web, image, video and news. While the Search Console shows web search data by default, you can easily switch between search types as per your convenience.
Besides, the Search Console also allows you to compare the data of two different search types using the filter option. This way, you can find out the search type for which your website performs the best or least.
The Performance report displays
- Total Clicks
- Total Impressions
- Average CTR (click-through rate)
- Average Position
- Top Queries (searches for which your site frequently appears).
- Top-Performing Pages on Your Website
- The Search Appearance of Your Site Across Different Countries and Devices
Page Indexing
The Page Indexing or Coverage report generated by the Google Search control tells you if your pages are indexed or not.
This report also comes in handy to troubleshoot technical issues as it points out errors on your site and also suggests how you can fix them.
As I said earlier, the Search Console sends you email alerts when it detects technical issues on your site. But then, it doesn’t notify you when those issues get worse.
So, it is good to check this report from time to time and fix issues at the earliest to maintain a healthy website and attract more traffic.
The status of the issues you see in this report will be marked as follows.
- Error– The page is yet to be indexed and doesn’t show up in Google Search.
- Valid with warnings– The page is indexed, but may or may not appear in Search. This is often a result of potential issues that need to be fixed.
- Valid- Appears in Search and no action required.
- Excluded– Page not indexed intentionally (due to the presence of noindex or canonical tags) because you don’t want Google to index it.
You can toggle between these four statues and take necessary actions to make improvements to your site.
Page Experience
This report brings together the Core Web Vitals report and other metrics that are part and parcel of Google’s Page Experience Update. As a reminder, the Core Web Vitals data relies on the Chrome User Experience Report, which includes data generated based on real users to your site.
The Page Experience report shows
- The percentage of your mobile URLs with a good Core Web Vitals score
- Total clicks you attract from good URLs
- The number of URLs that fail to meet Core Web Vitals
- Security issues preventing your site from offering a good page experience
- If a majority of your pages use HTTP or HTTPS.
Pro Tip: While the content quality of your page plays a major role in ranking your page higher, a positive page experience gives you a competitive advantage. So, make sure you don’t miss out on your site’s page experience.
Enhancements
Just like the Coverage report, the Enhancements report displays trends for errors, valid pages with errors and valid pages.
However, unlike the pages with warnings (in the Coverage report), valid pages with errors in this report may not be appearing in certain places on Google Search, like Rich Snippets and Top Stories, as the errors may hold them back.
Besides, the Enhancements report also covers structured data syntax issues. Based on the types of structured data you implement on your site, you may get more insights from this report.
Using this report, you can identify and fix potential structured data issues hampering your ranking progress on Google. Once you fix the problem, you can click the ‘Validate Fix’ button to inform Google that you have resolved it.
How to Troubleshoot with Google Search Console
Apart from the above comprehensive reports, the Google Search Console also provides webmasters with the URL inspection tool and manual actions report to fix issues that stop them from ranking better on Google.
URL Inspection Tool
The URL inspection tool lets you view all the errors on a particular page in one page. That’s extra convenient, right? You can save the pain of switching between reports to identify issues on a specific page.
With the URL inspection tool, you can check everything, from the indexation status to structured data issues of a page, all at once.
Manual Actions Report
Manual actions occur when a human reviewer finds out that a site violates Google Search Essentials (previously known as Webmaster Guidelines) in one way or the other. It can be anything, from unethical link building to misuse of structured data.
Manual actions can bring down the ranking of a particular page or even wipe off your site from Google SERPs based on the intensity of the violation.
When your site receives a manual action, you will get a mail from Google notifying you of it. You can get a glimpse of manual actions on your site right from the overview section of the Google Search Console.
You can see a detailed view of it in the manual actions section. Clicking on each manual action will show you a description of why the action is taken and how you can fix the issue.
Once you weed out the issue, you can hit the ‘request review’ button and ask Google to review your page. The review process may take anywhere from a few days to a week. Meanwhile, Google will keep you posted about the status of the review via email.
Google keeps adding new features to the search console to help webmasters analyze the performance of their websites.
Here, you can find all important Google Search Console updates:
Google to Add Markup Support for Vacation Rentals With Search Console Reports (December 04, 2023)
As we are approaching the end of the year, here’s another structured data update from Google. Yes, Google now supports schema markup for vacation rentals. That said, the search engine giant has also announced a new Google Search Console report and an updated Rich Results testing tool for this structured data.
If you are running a vacation rentals website, implementing this new schema markup will improve your chances of making it to Google’s Rich Results and be easily visible to your potential customers.
The supported fields for this markup include place fields, images, latitude and longitude, name, address, ratings, brand, check-in and out times, amenities and more.
Google has added a new Google Search Console report to track and validate the vacation rentals schema markup. This way, you can narrow down invalid items in your schema markup and take the necessary steps to fix them.
Also, The Rich Results testing tool is upgraded to align with the fields included in this new structured data.
As I mentioned earlier, making it to Google’s Rich Results is a good way to shoutout your online presence and get more clicks. Take another step closer to reaching the Rich Results for vacation rentals by adding this schema markup.
Most importantly, you have the insights from the new Search Console report to tell you if you are on the right track.
Google Search Console Drops Mobile Usability Report & Mobile-Friendly Tests (December 04, 2023)
Google has now retired the Mobile Usability report, Mobile-Friendly Test tool and Mobile-Friendly Test API from the Search Console. While the announcement came in April, these reports are now finally gone. Google took to X (formerly Twitter) to make the news official.
Google penned down, “Today we’re sunsetting Search Console’s Mobile Usability report, Mobile-Friendly Test tool and Mobile-Friendly Test API. We believe these tools helped website owners make the web a better place – thank you for working with us on this journey! “
The search engine giant Google has wiped off mentions of the mobile-friendly test and the mobile usability report from its search help documentation. In fact, the mobile-friendly test page URL google.com/test/mobile-friendly presently redirects to Google’s Lighthouse documentation.
Google Expands Organization Structured Data With Search Console Reports (November 29, 2023)
With just two days past a fresh structured data update, here’s Google rolling out another one. This time, the search engine expands support for organization structured data alongside offering Search Console reports and the rich results testing tool.
This schema markup helps you to tell Google specific details about your organization or business. The organization structured data fields include name, alternate name, legal name, description,logo, URL, sameAs, address, street address, locality, region, postal code, country, contact point, telephone phone, contact email, number of employees, ID number and more. Previously, this markup supported only logo and URL-based data fields
Google has updated the reports in Google Search Console to support validation of the new fields included.The inclusion of the revamped Rich Results testing tool supports faster validation of this new structured data.
Google says, “The existing logo report in Search Console and validations in the Rich Results Test are now replaced with more extensive organization validations in the Rich Results Test.”
Using the new fields in organization markup to the maximum can help you prompt Google to show more accurate information about your business when it appears in SERPs.
Google Launches Profile Page and Discussion Forum Structured Data With Search Console Reports (November 27, 2023)
Google is rolling out new discussion forum and profile page structured data on Google Search, with new Search Console reports respectively.
The profile page structured data is for creators and organizations sharing first-hand perspectives. Using this schema markup, you can prompt Google to highlight the author’s name, social media handles, profile pictures, followers count and the popularity of the content created by them in Google Search.
On the other hand, discussion forum structured data is ideal for forum-based sites where multiple individuals record their first-hand perspectives. With this structured data implementation, it becomes easier for Google to narrow down relevant online discussions.
With the rollout of these two schema markups, Google has launched new Search Console reports to facilitate webmasters to keep track of and fix issues related to discussion threads and profile page structured data.
These reports show valid and invalid elements on your schema-integrated pages. With these reports, you can quickly identify issues with your profile page and discussion forum schema markups and fix them effectively. As an alternative, you can also use the Rich Results Test to test and validate your structured data.
Implementing these structured data markups, and most importantly, tweaking them based on the Search Console reports can help you achieve greater visibility for relevant searches and attract more clicks.
Crawl Rate Limiter Tool in Search Console is Going Away (November 24, 2023)
Google has announced that it will remove the Googlebot Crawl Rate Limiter Tool from the Google Search Console on January 08, 2024. The search engine giant goes on to explain that the improvements made to crawling make the tool unnecessary going forward.
Launched in 2008, the Crawl Rate Limiter Tool helps control how fast Google crawls your website. Despite the tool’s 15-year-old legacy, Google didn’t migrate it to the upgraded versions of the Search Console.
Google’s Gary Illyes says, “the rate limiter tool had a much slower effect; in fact it may have taken over a day for the new limits to be applied on crawling.”
In fact, Google has previously recommended not to limit the crawl rate unless necessary. They stated, “We recommend against limiting the crawl rate unless you are seeing server load problems that are definitely caused by Googlebot hitting your server too hard.”
With the removal of the crawl limiter tool, Google will set the minimum crawling rate lower than the old crawl rate limits. Illyes goes on to ensure, “we effectively continue honoring the settings that some site owners have set in the past if the Search interest is low, and our crawlers don’t waste the site’s bandwidth.”
If you are using the Crawl Rate Limiter Tool, it’s time to move on. Alternatively, you can also check the impact on your server once the tool is removed and take steps accordingly.
Google Adds New Course Rich Results Report in Search Console (November 15, 2023)
Google has expanded its courses rich results to show information, including pricing, ratings, educational level and length using structured data. Previously, it was limited to name, description, and the course publisher.
In the light of the new enhancements, consequently, Google has also included a new course rich results report to the Search Console. Google wrote, “To help you monitor and fix your structured data, we’re adding a new course info Rich result report in Search Console”, and made it official.
The course rich results report in Search Console displays valid and invalid structured data elements in pages that include course info structured data. It highlights issues that make your structured data elements invalid.
This way, this new report comes in handy to identify and fix bugs related to your structured data in a seamless and more effective manner.
Additionally, you can leverage the Rich result test in Google Search Console to evaluate the validity of your course info structured data by submitting the corresponding page URL. This tool is a shortcut to instantly check if your structured data is valid. That means, when you use this tool, you don’t have to wait for the rich results report to be updated.
Google Search Console Brings New Merchant Center Integrated Reports (September 11, 2023)
Google has introduced new enhancements to the Shopping tab Listings report in the Search Console to help merchants improve the visibility of their products in Google Search.
This update comes almost a year after Google added the shopping data section to Search Console last November. If you are running an E-Commerce store, this is something you should never miss out on.
With this newest update, you have two new reports. The first report highlights issues that stop your products from showing up in the Google Shopping tab. Here’s how vendors will be notified when products stop appearing on the Shopping tab due to potential issues.
The second one shows fluctuations in clicks and rankings of your products in Google Search. It helps you to identify opportunities to boost clicks and improve the Google rankings of your products. Check out the screenshot below.
To enable these in your Shopping tab Listing report in Search Console, you need to integrate your Search Console property with a Google Merchant Center account.
This new Search Console feature allows you to delve deeper into the performance of your E-Commerce site and get actionable insights to boost the online visibility of your products considerably.
Google to Retire Sitemaps Ping Endpoint (June 26, 2023)
Google will soon retire the support for sitemaps ping endpoint. The endpoint will stop working in 6 months and the HTTP pings to the deprecated endpoint will result in a 404 error. However, you can still submit sitemaps using the Search Console and robots.txt files.
Google says, “Our internal studies—and also other search engines such as Bing—tell us that at this point these unauthenticated sitemap submissions are not very useful. In fact, in the case of Google Search, the vast majority of the submissions lead to spam.” This update comes many months after Google stating that pinginging sitemaps can get new content indexed faster.
Instead, Google recommends using accurate lastmod date in your sitemap file. Your lastmod data should be in a supported data format. If it is not, the Search Console will notify you once you submit the sitemap.
Google adds, “it needs to consistently match reality: if your page changed 7 years ago, but you’re telling us in the lastmod element that it changed yesterday, eventually we’re not going to believe you anymore when it comes to the last modified date of your pages.”
So, make sure you use the lastmod element in your sitemap for pages you are confident about.
Google Unveils New User Feedback Form to Improve Search Quality (June 14, 2023)
Google has upgraded its search spam report AKA search quality feedback form to address search quality issues more effectively than ever before.
The new feedback form allows you to report a wide range of issues, including spam, paid links, offensive content, low quality, and other search quality issues.
However, as an initiative to weed out spam reports, Google is likely to disregard identical feedback forms submitted by the same user. So, make sure you use the form rightly focusing on constructive criticism.
When reporting an issue, you can select a category based on the nature of the problem in question. You are also free to choose multiple issues under a particular category.
Plus, the bulk submission feature allows you to narrow down and submit up to five pages that violate a particular Google policy, all in one report.
Once you submit your feedback, you will get a confirmation email from Google. Apart from feedback submission confirmation, the email will also contain additional links related to Google’s quality policy and their forum for custom support.
Google Upgrades Video Indexing Report in Search Console (June 12, 2023)
Google has now expanded the video indexing report in Search Console to provide more specific issues and reasons why your videos are not appearing in the Google Search results.
Previously, the Search Console only showed the “Google could not determine the prominent video on the page” error notification when it faced problems with indexing video assets on a website. On the contrary, with the current update, the video indexing report will point to specific issues with your video content.
Google wrote, “In order to help you better understand this issue and provide you with more actionable reasons, we are breaking down the “Google could not determine the prominent video on the page” reason into three more specific reasons”.
Those 3 reasons are as follows.
- Video Outside the Viewport – This indicates that your video isn’t rightly positioned. Alter the position of your video in such a way that it is within the renderable range of the page and spotted as and when the page loads.
- Video Too Small – Your video content may go unindexed if it is not of the appropriate size. Increase the height and width of your video so that it is more than 140px and at least one-third of the width of the page.
- Video Too Tall- If your video is pretty tall, tweak its measure to less than 1080px.
The revamped version of the video indexing report looks like this.
The new video indexing report helps you pinpoint the potential issues with your videos so that you can optimize them appropriately and get them indexed faster.
Don’t see the new version of the video indexing report in the Search Console yet? Or do you still see the “Google could not determine the prominent video on the page” error? Worry not. Google says that it may take three months for the historical data to go away. So, you will get to see the latest report loaded with reasons sooner or later.
Google Search Console to Add Interaction to Next Paint (INP) to Its Core Web Vitals Report (May 10, 2023)
Google is planning to include a new metric, Interaction to Next Paint (INP), to the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console.
INP will be effective from March 2024 and will replace First Input Delay (FID), which is currently one of Google’s three Core Web Vitals.
Core Web Vitals are the measure of a page’s performance in alignment with user experience. So, what sets INP newest metric apart from FID?
FID tracks only the delay between the user’s first interaction with the web page and the processing of the interaction by the browser. On the other hand, INP measures the overall responsiveness of the web page in question.
As Google says, INP is “a metric that assesses a page’s overall responsiveness to user interactions by observing the time that it takes for the page to respond to all click, tap, and keyboard interactions that occur throughout the lifespan of a user’s visit to a page”.
That said, INP watches out for the responsiveness of a web page throughout the journey of the visitor on that particular page.
Websites that take steps to optimize page speed and performance are likely to achieve good INP scores when the pending metric becomes active.
To help webmasters and SEOs evaluate their site’s INP beforehand, Search Console will start showing INP scores later this year.
Good INP scores are those that are less than or equal to 200ms. Scores ranging from 200-500 ms denote that your page needs improvement and anything more than 500 ms signals a poor INP score.
Using the ample time given by Google the right way and making INP-focused enhancements to your page can help generate more positive user experience signals to complement your search rankings.
Core Web Vitals Report Update: March, 28, 2023
On March 27, 2023, Google introduced an update to the Core Web Vitals report within Google Search Console. As a result of this update, users might notice changes in the number of URLs listed in their Core Web Vitals report.
In a statement, Google explained, “The number of URLs in your Core Web Vitals report may have changed. This is attributed to the inclusion of a new origin group that now covers data for URLs that were previously below the data threshold.”
Users can expect to see a small marker in the report, indicating the update’s implementation. This is what the marker looks like:
Google Introduces New URL Inspection Tool API – February, 2022
Google announced the launch of a new URL Inspection API, which will allow third-party SEO apps and software’s to interact with one of the most popular features in.
This new feature will help SEOs and publishers discover issues lurking within the pages and debug problems more efficiently. The additional information provided by API integrated tools can help fix issues much faster.
As all APIs are supposed to do, the URL Inspection API also acts as a bridge between two software programs to communicate with each other.
The Search Console API currently allows apps like Screaming Frog to collect search console data like clicks, CTR and positions. The API can also help discover new URLs for crawling and add orphaned URLs to site audit reports.
The existing Search Console API enabled many SEO tools and a handful of WordPress plugins to access the vital information which otherwise would require manual import.
With the new URL Inspection API, you can now request the information about the currently indexed version of an URL and the API will return the latest information available in the URL Inspection tool.
Google shared examples for how this specific API access can be used:
- “For example, checking if there are differences between user-declared and Google-selected canonicals, or debugging structured data issues from a group of pages.
- CMS and plugin developers can add page or template-level insights and ongoing checks for existing pages. For example, monitoring changes over time for key pages to diagnose issues and help prioritize fixes.”
More About URL Inspection Tool API
The URL Inspection Tool API provides valuable information about URLs that are indexed by Google, any indexing issues that might occur and also notify about errors in structured data and AMP.
Once you make the API call, you will get a relevant response or if the request fails, you will get an error message.
However, you cannot test live URLs using the tool’s API
Usage Limit
Currently, there is a usage quota of 2,000 total queries/day and a speed limit of 600 queries per minute.
However, the new URL Inspection tool API opens up new ways to track the progress of a site’s SEO, identify problems easily and resolve them quickly.
This new feature is expected to appear in tools and plugins very soon.
Page Experience Report for Desktop Pages – January 2022
In late 2021, Google announced that it would be launching the page experience update for desktop early next year. It seems like the search engine giant is all set to initiate it as they added a page experience report for desktop in the Search Console dashboard.
The report will have a dedicated section for the desktop, which will help you understand the ‘good page experience’ criteria of Google.
To access this report, you have to visit the Google Search Console. Go to the Experience tab and click on the Page Experience link.
You can access the report directly by clicking here.
The page experience report was first launched in April 2021 by Google. In the new Google Page Experience report, you will access different metrics like the percentage of your URLs that have a good page experience, search impressions over time, etc.
With these metrics, you can evaluate the desktop pages’ performance quickly. The report also provides details of specific pages to know exactly what improvements you have to make.
Once you have access to this report, you can make the required changes to your page’s desktop version. This way, you will be ready for the desktop version of Google’s page experience update.
It is important to note that Page Experience Update for Desktop won’t lead to a huge ranking fluctuation.
However, if your stories appear in the top stories section, your website will be impacted more. This is because you need a good page experience score to appear in the top stories carousel
URL Testing Tools Updated – October 2021
Google continues to make new additions and feature improvements to the search console. The latest update to the search console brings AMP Validator, Mobile Friendliness, and Rich Results under the URL inspection tool within the search console.
According to Google, all three tools are separate entities but use the same engine that the URL Inspection tool uses to power the results. Over time, each of these tools has received feature updates separately to serve the webmasters better.
However, Google has incorporated all three features within the URL inspection report, and users don’t have to toggle between different tools to get the report. But that said, the stand-alone tools looked significantly different from how they looked in the search console.
Starting now, some of the standard features you used in the search console are coming to all three stand-alone public testing tools.
Some of the features that you can now see in the stand-alone tools are:
- Page availability – It checks whether Google could crawl the page, when the latest crawl happened, or any issues it encountered when crawling the URL.
- HTTP headers – This displays the HTTP header status code returned while inspecting the URL.
- Page screenshot – The rendered page as seen by Google.
- Paired AMP inspection- It will inspect both canonical and AMP URLs.
Job Posting Report- March 2021
Google has made two additional changes to the rich results report in Google Search Console. One update was related to the job posting report in March and the second change was related to FAQ and Q&A rich results report in February.
Google stated that starting March 11th, 2021, Google has changed its requirement for the Education, Experience, and ExperienceInPlaceOfEducation properties of job posting structured markup. Due to these changes, you may see an increase in warnings for job posting instances, says Google.
If you notice these new errors in the rich results report, ensure you review those warnings and ensure that your job posting structured data follows the new requirement stated here.
FAQ and Q&A Report – February 2021
Google stated that starting March 2, 2021, it will now start to check the validity of FAQ and Q&A structured data that is below the root entity level. Previously, Google only checked the validity of FAQ & Q&A structured data at the root level.
Post this update, you may see an increase in the valid, warning, and invalid FAQ and Q&A items in the rich results report. If you see new issues, follow the instructions in the report and you’ll be good to go.
Addition of Associations Feature – February 2021
Google on February 22nd announced the addition of “associations” feature on Search Console that enables users to connect to other associated Google services.
Using this feature, users can now connect YouTube, Analytics, Android Apps, Google Ads, Actions Console, Chrome Web Store and Play Console to the Search Console.
This new feature comes in handy for Webmasters who manage multiple Search Console properties as now they can connect other Google-owned entities associated with the property.
They can now connect to the associated Google services by going to Setting→ Associations.
Please note that this feature will be only active for webmasters with Full Access to the website data on Search Console.
Benefits of Connecting Associations
Google Analytics: If Google Analytics is your go-to tool for tracking your website’s visitors and their engagement, connecting it as an associated property will benefit as Analytics can fetch more data about organic search results and display it in the Search Console reports area.
Google Ads: By connecting Google Ads as an associated property, you get the opportunity to find paid and organic reports directly in the Google Ads dashboard.
Play Console App: Use App Indexing
Actions Console Project: Verify your brand and enable cross-platform functionality.
Chrome Web Store account: Publish apps and extensions to the Chrome Web Store on behalf of your site.
It’s important not to get confused between Associations and Property Sets, which Google earlier used to call Domain Properties.
The Domain Property or Property Sets is a verification method to collect site data from different root parameters. Associations feature enables you to see different associated Google services that come under a property set.
Apart from Analytics, the rest of the properties can be associated with multiple Search Console properties and accounts. However, when it comes to Google Analytics, the webmaster can associate it only with one Search Console property.
Also, if you have already connected your Google Services to the search console, these services will automatically appear inside the associations. If not, you have to connect using the product which you want to associate with your site.
Here is what happens:
Step 1: Request is made using the product interface for their service. Example: For YouTube, use the option in YouTube Studio to request the association.
Step 2: Check your Search Console Association dashboard to see the notification.
Step 3: Deny or Approve the Association Request. On accepting, you will start noticing the associated Google Service within the dashboard.
Step 4: If you want to remove an associated service, just click on the Three-Dot Icon and press remove.
Google News Performance Report- January 2021
Google launched its news performance report on 12th January to let publishers have a better understanding of user behavior on Google news for Android and IOS devices, as well as on news.google.com.
Publishers will be able to access their performance report from the Search Console by clicking Google News in the left navigation’s performance section.
The report will include important metrics like clicks, click-through rate (CTR), and impressions that will help publishers to find answers to questions like how many times their articles have appeared to users on Google news or which articles have performed exceptionally well in Google news.
This report will be shown for any site appearing on Google news.
Google AMP Now Supports Signed Exchange – August 2020
Google AMP has been discussed for a long time and one common issue that webmasters highlight is the URL and other attribution issues.
The Signed Exchange is a new web packing system that enables publishers to deliver portable content, such as AMP, without losing their attribution and integrity.
Google has been supporting this specification for some time now. However, the search giant has now said that the AMP enhancement report within the Search Console will help webmasters identify issues with ‘signed exchange.’
Google Search Console API Upgrade -August 2020
Google said that the infrastructure it uses for the Search Console API has been upgraded.
The revamped version of the Search Console API will more or less be similar but with an added backward functionality.
The announcement says, “API is backward compatible and there are currently no changes in scope or functionality.”
The upgraded version will also have a few things for webmasters to note.
- Changes on Google Cloud Platform dashboard: You may find a drop in the old API usage report and an increase in the new one.
- API key restriction changes: The previous API key restrictions may not work, you may need to change them.
- Discovery document changes: Webmasters using third-party API library or querying directly on Webmaster Discovery Document have to update it by the end of the year.
Mobile-First Indexing Update – July 2020
COVID-19 has disrupted every inch of the planet, and Google says it understands what website owners are currently going through.
According to a new Google announcement, the scheduled date to use Mobile-First Indexing has been postponed due to the COVID pandemic.
The search giant earlier planned to enable mobile-first indexing for all websites starting September 2020, but the latest announcement says that this will be pushed further until March 2021.
Webmasters who received mobile-first indexing errors via the Search Console now get more time to fix the issues. Meanwhile, any new site or the ones that have already moved to mobile-first indexing shouldn’t be concerned about the announcement.
Rich Results Tool Out of Beta – July 2020
Google, for quite some time now, has been testing its exclusive Rich Results tool. Now, the search giant has announced that it’s out of beta.
But there is a catch here.
If you are somebody who is used to the Structured Data Testing Tool, this announcement is the last thing you want to hear.
We all know that Google doesn’t support all the structured data that is supported within the Schema.org.
However, the structured data testing tool supported all Schema and helped fix almost all schema markups with errors.
With the Rich Results Testing tool’s announcement, Google also said that the Structured Data testing tool will be depreciated soon.
However, webmasters have started complaining that the new Rich Result Test is more of a downgrade.
It doesn’t support the schemas that were otherwise supported in the Structured Data Testing Tool.
Core Web Vitals Announced – June 2020
Google announced new user experience signals that will soon become a ranking signal. The search engine giant introduced the concept of Core WebVitals that incorporate three essential user experience factors that evaluate the real-time user experience.
Starting in 2021, the WebVitals will become part of Google’s ranking algorithms and will join the list of 200+ signals that the search giant uses to rank pages on SERPs.
Three Google defined Web Vitals:
Largest Contentful Paint
A slow server response time and render-blocking scripts can result in a low Largest Contentful Paint score. Google recommends 2.5 Sec as the ideal score for Largest Contentful Paint.
First Input Delay
FID score is the time the browser takes to respond to the user interaction. Google recommends 100 milliseconds or less as the ideal score for First Input Delay.
Cumulative Layout Shift
Cumulative Layout Shift detects the changes in the website’s visual element after it’s displayed to the users.
Guided Recipes on Google Assistant Update-May 2020
Until May 2020, cooking website owners had to wait for Google to reprocess their sites before they could see their updates on Google Assistant. But Google has now introduced support for Guided Recipes in Search Console as well as in the Rich Results Test tool.
This will allow site owners to validate the markup instantly for individual recipes and discover any issues with the available recipes on their site.
Guided Recipes Enhancement Report
Users can now view a Rich Result Status Report with the errors, warnings, and fully valid pages found among their site’s recipes in Search Console. It also includes a checkbox to show trends on search impressions.
In addition, the report can be used to notify Google about any changes made on a web page and should be recrawled.
Users can add Guided Recipe structured data to a page and submit its URL – or just test a code snippet within the Rich Results Test tool. Use the Preview tool in the Rich Results Test to see how Assistant guidance for a recipe will appear on a smart display.
Core Web Vitals-May 2020
A set of metrics known as the Google’s Core Web Vitals, now have their own report in Search Console. Core Web Vitals were introduced in early May 2020 to measure the quality of user experience offered by a site.
According to Google, these are critical metrics that will provide all site owners with an easy way to measure the user experience they offer through their websites. The Core Web Vitals feature in the Search Console will replace the old Speed report.
This change only indicates how Google is highly focused on the user experience and is giving more impetus to it over the loading speed of a site. To know more about how to optimize the speed of your website, read our in-depth article on Page Speed Optimization.
Google has laid out the three major criteria a site needs to fulfil for good user experience- loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
Details of Core Web Vitals
There are three main metrics that make up the Core Web Vitals:
- Largest Contentful Paint: It measures the perceived load speed and marks the point in the page load timeline when the page’s main content has likely loaded. The ideal speed for this is up to 2.5 seconds.
- First Input Delay: It measures the responsiveness of a website and quantifies the user experience of the first interaction with a web page. The ideal measurement of this should be below 100 seconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift: It measures the visual stability and quantifies the amount of unexpected layout shift of visible page content. The ideal measurement for this should be below 0.1 seconds.
How to Read the Core Web Vitals Report?
The Core Web Vitals Report on Search Console shows URL performance based on status, metric type and URL group. On the “Overview” tab, a user can shift between ‘Poor,’ ‘Needs Improvement,’ or ‘Good’ tabs.
On each of the tab, the user can click on “Open Report” to see the page performance numbers for desktop and mobile devices. Users can further click on individual rows in the table to see URLs groups affected by certain issues.
Google recommends fixing the “Poor” issues first and then prioritizing other page fixes. The most common page fixes should include reducing page size to less than 500 KB, limiting the number of page resources to 50 and considering using AMP.
Better Data Export in Search Console- 26-02-2020
The Google Search Console team has announced that there will be more and better data available to export from now on. Users can now download almost the entire data in Search Console Reports instead of just specific table views. This data will be much easier to read outside the Search Console and can be stored for future reference.
Enhancement Reports
When exporting data from reports like AMP status, users can export data behind the charts. this means they can see a daily breakdown of pages, impressions, and status received on Google Search results besides the list of issues and their affected pages.
Performance Report
For performance data, users can download the content of all tab with one click in two forms, either, Google sheets or Excel spreadsheet with multiple tabs and CSV files compressed in a zip file. Along with the performance data, users will have an additional tab named “Filters”, which will show the filters applied when the data was exported.
Additional Ways to use Search Console Data
Depending on the user’s technical expertise, users can avail of any of the two options to use Search Console Data. if the user has a technical background, then he may consider using the Search Console API to add, view or remove properties and sitemaps, and to run advanced queries for Google Search results data.
Alternatively, Google Data Studio is a dashboarding solution that allows users by unifying data from different sources. The tool provides a Search Console connector to import various metrics and dimensions into the user dashboard so that they can see Search Console data side-by-side with data from other tools.
Change of Address Features – 19-02-2020
I hope you are familiar with the site address change option within the new search console. This option, which is present within the settings of each web property within the search, is now getting an update.
Soon you will notice a few additional features within the change of address section, which will give you further insights about whether the address change has been successful or not.
Usually, the change of address tool becomes handy when a website decides to change the domain name or move their subdomain to a different address.
Once the redirects are done within the website (301 Redirect to be specific), webmasters used the change of address tool within the search console to let Google Crawlers know that the site has been moved to the new domain or subdomain.
Once the request to change the address is placed using the change of address tool, Google will start giving priority to index the new address of the site and slowly ignores the old address.
Redirect Validation
Starting Feb 2020, Google will be adding a few new features to help webmasters check the validation of their redirect request. Usually, a complete change of the domain name prerequisite 301 redirects.
This provides search engine crawlers to redirect all the authority and trust gained by the old domain to the new one. In addition to this, any user who tries accessing the older version of the site gets automatically redirected to the new one.
As of now, webmasters had no clue whether the redirects are successful. With the new Redirect Validation feature added to the search console, they will get full clarity as the Search Console will now validate the redirect of the top 5 URLs of the domain, which essentially means a successful 301 redirect.
On-screen Reminder
It takes a few months for Google to completely redirect the whole rankings signals of the old domain to the new one. It’s estimated that a complete and successful 301 redirect will take 180 days to pass the signals. This could change depending upon the number of pages within site and the number of backlinks it has generated.
Starting now, the webmasters will get a notification within the search console dashboard about the progress. A new blurb will appear on top of the dashboard that says, “The site is currently moving to www.xyz.com.”
The notification will go off after a cycle of 180 days. However, if you are new to SEO, the Change of Address feature is not a tool that can implement 301 redirect on your website. It’s just part of the Google Search Console, and you have to implement 301 redirect within your website and pages within it before using the Change of Address feature.
Review Snippet – 10-02-2020
Google announced Review Snippet support in the new search console, enabling webmasters to find and resolve issues with their review markup.
Review snippets have been around the corner for some time now, but lately, Google seems to be giving more emphasis to this feature.
Last year, Google announced that the review snippet is one of the most misused structured data types and it intends to curb this by enabling it only on a few webpage types such as Movie Reviews, Products and Software.
Review snippet is considered as a Clink-Through magnet as the star rating displayed on the SERP results, which is an aggregate score, creates trust in the users.
With the introduction of Review Snippet enhancement feature, webmasters can now find issues with the markup implementation.
In addition to this, Google has also announced that webmasters can now test the review markup code even before going live using the Rich Result Testing Tool.
The new Review Snippet enhancement feature is only available on the search console dashboard of websites that have enabled the review markup. According to the official statement from Google, “the report allows you to see errors, warnings, and valid pages for markup implemented on your site.”
In addition to the review snippet enhancement feature, the Review Snippet will also be part of the Performance Report filter. This will help webmasters understand how the review snippet performed in terms of clicks and CTR on the SERP.
Removals Report – 28-01-2020
Google announced that a new feature has been to its Search Console to temporarily block the search engine from displaying results from your site.
According to the official announcement, the new Removals Report in the search console can come handy to webmasters if they want to remove a specific page from the search results temporarily. In addition to this, the webmasters will also get the info about takedown requests filed using Google public tools.
Google has added three types of removal tools into the new Search Console to help webmasters report, review, and takedown URLs that are contentious.
Temporary Removals Tool
Google Search Console now has a dedicated feature, “Removals,” which will have Temporary Removals as one of the options. This option is for webmasters who want to remove a specific content or URL from Google’s Index.
This tool becomes handy if you want an immediate removal of a conflicting page until you get clarity on whether it has to be displayed on search or not. On request for a Temporary Removal of a URL, the particular page will not be visible on SERP for six months. Even though this is not a permanent solution to page removal, webmasters can decide on the fate of the page during this period.
Webmasters get two different options within the Temporary Removal Tool.
- Temporarily remove the page/URL for the next six months.
- Clear the existing page cache, including title, description, and snippet from Google’s index until the crawler revisits the page for indexing.
Outdated Content
Within this section, the webmasters can find the removal requests filed by Google users through the publicly available Remove Outdated Content Tool. Anyone who feels the information is no longer available or adds value to the SERP can submit a removal request. Webmasters will be notified about such requests within this section of the Search Console.
SafeSearch Filtering
The third new tab added to the Removals Feature on the new Search Console is SafeSearch Filtering. This section lists the pages that users reported for adult content using the publicly available SafeSearch Suggestion tool.
Any request filed by the users with regards to adult content will be reviewed by Google to decide whether to filter it from SafeSearch results.
Accurate Index Coverage Report – 15-12-2019
Google on Dec 15 announced that the Index Coverage report has been further improved. According to the tweet, the Search Console can now do more accurate coverage of the indexed pages. With the new update, some of the pages that were under the “Crawled – currently not indexed” category has been indexed.
Search Console Messages – 04-12-2019
Google updated its search console dashboard with a new innate message feature on December 4. The new feature will make it easier for webmasters to check messages from Google. The function can now be accessed within the search console dashboard on the top right-hand corner.
Google has been making quite a lot of improvements to the new search console after they completely discarded the earlier version.
The search engine giant has been keen on making a lot of valuable additions to the new search console. This is being done to ensure that webmasters get more essential features that can improve the quality of their websites.
The announcement of the new update came through the official webmaster central blog. “As of today, messages will be available through a panel accessed easily by clicking the bell icon at the top of any page in Search Console. The main difference from the old interface is that now you’ll have access to your messages throughout the product, no need to leave your reports.”
The webmasters can access the messages sent or received from May 23, 2019, by clicking on the bell icon.
Products Results in Search Console – 20 -11 – 2019
Google, on Monday, November 20, announced the addition of a new feature to its Search Console that will display the impressions, clicks, and essential metrics for the Product Rich Results.
Google has been displaying rich results such as rating, price, and availability of the products for shoppers to compare and buy products easily. The new feature added to the search console will help merchants analyze the reach and impact of these results.impact of these rich results.
Google Search Console has been helping webmasters across the globe with insightful data regarding the number of impressions, clicks, and other useful metrics. This data is beneficial for making decisive changes to the website, such as the devices used by the prospective uses, geography, and queries.
If your e-commerce site has added the Product Rich Snippet schema correctly, you will now see a new search appearance type “Product Results.” A further deep dive into this segment will provide a complete analysis of how your products performed on Google search.
The data provided on the “Product Results” area will help you understand how the rich result features such as the ratings, price, and availability of the product help in bringing the traffic.
In addition to this, you will also get a detailed insight into the kind of queries the target audience used to reach your website. This can be a great addition to your audience research, as you can analyze the latest trends and turbulence in the shopping behavior of the users.
Speed report in Search Console – 04-10-2019
Google, through its official webmaster central blog, announced that the new Search Console has started displaying the Speed report as one of the Enhancement features.
Google has been testing the speed report for a while. The preview version of the same was displayed during this year’s Google IO conference. The new search console update is an indication of Google giving more importance to site speed.
According to the official announcement, the new Site Speed Enhancement Report will help webmasters identify site speed issues as and when they pop up. It will additionally help them come up with suitable fixes before potential users experience it. Google has made the analysis simple for webmasters as each page on a site will be provided with a speed score of “Fast,” “Moderate,” and “Slow.”
This data is derived from the Chrome Users Experience Report, which is based on the metrics gathered from the experience of real users who use the Chrome browser.
The report is generated for individual URLs, which makes it easy for webmasters to come up with fixes based on the specific inputs provided by the Search Console Speed Report. If you find a site with most of its pages labeled as moderate or slow, it’s better to check the reasons that are causing the slowdown using the Page Speed Insight tool.
Once the issues that cause the slow down is fixed, webmasters can request Search Console to validate the fix and revise the speed score. This provides the webmaster the clarification on whether the fix implemented to speed up the page was successful or not.
The Speed Score is assigned to websites based on the aggregate time taken for First Contentful Paint (FCP). FCP is essentially the time taken for the browser to render the first visible element on the page.
As of now, the Speed report in the Search Console is marked as an experimental project. This is because Google will be making significant additions and improvements to this report in the coming days, says the official announcement.
Google Search Console Adds New Reports For Video Results – 08 October 2019
Google is reportedly making video searches on its platform more effortless for people. The search engine giant introduced two new tools to help webmasters understand the performance of their videos in Search and identify opportunities to improve video markups.
People come across videos in Google through these three ways:
- The main search result page
- The “videos” tab in the search result page
- Suggested content in Google Discover feed
With today’s launch, Google will now report the performance of videos under each of these tabs mentioned above.
With today’s launch, Google will now report the performance of videos under each of these tabs mentioned above.
Video Enhancement Report
Sites using structured data for videos will now be able to see a new report in search console under the ”Videos” tab. Just like every other Search Console report, this tab will show errors and warnings for video markups implemented on a website. It will also help in identifying the pages that have error-free video markups. Besides identifying errors, these reports can also be used to validate an issue resolved by re-crawling affected pages.
Video Appearances in the Performance Report
The Search Console performance report already includes an option to see the performance of the video tab search result (type = video). Google has now extended its support for videos so that webmasters can now see the performance of their videos in the main Search results tab (type = web).
Previously, the Search Console will only report on the video performances in the “Video” tab. Content can accompany video appearance if any page uses VideoObject structured data, or if Google uses other signals to detect a video on the page.
These new tools are expected to make it easier for webmasters and site owners to understand the performance of their videos and fix any issues related to it.
Fresher Data in Search Console – 23 September 2019
On Monday, September 23, Google announced that the performance report in Search Console had been upgraded with improved and fresh data. With this new update, webmasters can now see data that is less than a day old!
The performance report integration in the new Search Console has helped webmasters understand a lot of metrics. These are organic traffic better, top keywords driving traffic, most visited webpages and audience demography. Webmasters can now easily track the daily performance of their website and compare performance based on weekdays vs.weekends.
The new performance report also boasts details of the data time zone, which is set by default at the Pacific time zone. This allows webmasters to interpret the data and compare it with the local time zone. Also, Google has made it easier for webmasters to analyze search trends by exporting data in the Search Console or exporting the chart.
Crawl Error Report Update- End of March 2019
The update improved the crawl error report in Google Search Console. The new changes allowed webmasters to fix issues much effectively and request for a quick reprocessing. It also prevented old crawl error reports from the desktop, smartphones, and site-wide from arising.
Sitemaps Data Update- End of March 2019
Google is planning to add advanced features for sitemaps data in the new version of the Search Console. The advanced, rich sitemap data will help webmasters to filter out the URLs that they want to focus on. The Fetch as Google feature will get an upgrade as a URL inspection tool in Search Console. The updated tool will help webmasters to find details of the indexed pages and check live URLs
User Management- End of March 2019
The cluttered interface of the old user-management features in the old Search Console will be soon be replaced by an advanced user management setting available in the new Search Console.
Google Officially Launches Domain Property In Search Console – February 2019
Earlier, Google recommended webmasters to treat different versions of web URLs, such as HTTP, HTTPS, mobile, www, and non-www versions as separate entities. The property set option was used by webmasters to group these versions in a single set in the Search Console.
However, on February 27 this year, Google has announced that it will not require webmasters to verify different versions of a website when it rolls out an update from now onwards. With the property sets implemented, Google was having a hard time assimilating date from different sets of properties to understand how a website is performing. With the release of this new update in Google Search Console, the property sets will come to a permanent end.
With property sets no more functional, webmasters can enjoy relief from manually putting together search console data. In an official email, Google officially announced the scrapping of property sets. Along with it, Google is also expected to bid farewell to some of the old search console features as it revamps by the end of March 2019. Google is also discontinuing certain features with the latest update as webmasters seldom use them.
Here are some of the upcoming changes in Search Console that Google will roll out in March:
Crawl Error Report
The Google Search Console update improved the crawl error report. According to Google, the updated version of this feature will be more focused on the issues and patterns used while indexing.
The proposed change will help webmasters fix the issues much faster, and they can also request a quick reprocessing. The new update also pulled the plug from the old Crawl Errors report – for Desktop, Smartphone, and site-wide errors.
Sitemaps Data
It’s also time to forget the old sitemaps report as Google plans to add a few advanced features to the new version with reports on images and videos as new additions.
Also, the new feature-rich sitemap data will make it easier for webmasters to filter out the URLs that they focus on. This feature is already available in the Index Coverage report of the new Search Console.
Fetch as Google
The Fetch as Google feature from the old search console, which was one of the most used features by webmasters will get a new name and life as a URL inspection tool in the new Search Console.
The updated tool will give webmasters the details of indexed pages. In addition to this, Google recently added a new property to check the live URL.
Above all, submitting the URL to reprocess new data will remain the core functionality of the URL inspection tool.
The URL Inspection tool has already become popular among the Updated Search Console users, as it provides more advanced data than the old Fetch as Google.
User-management
Managing users has always been a pain in the old search console. The clutter in the interface contributed to the confusion.
Now, Google says that it has fixed the issue as the user management option has been added to the Settings section of the new search console. This means the old user-management feature in the old Search Console will die soon.
Structured Data Dashboard
In 2018, Google had introduced a new structured data feature on its new search console to give users insights on how their Rich Results are performing. Google also included dedicated reports per vertical, be it Jobs, Recipes, Events, or Q&As.
According to Google, removing all the unsupported Rich Results features will reduce the distraction faced by webmasters while fixing issues that don’t impact site displays on the SERP.
Letting go of some old features
Google also says in the blog post that it’s forced to let go of some of the features that webmasters may still find useful.
The highlight is the HTML suggestion that helps webmasters filter out duplicate titles.
Google says it’s essential to ensure there are no duplicate titles. However, it recommends using other tools that can crawl websites to check duplicate titles & descriptions.
Structured Data Dashboard- August 2018
Google, in 2018, had introduced a new structured data feature on its new search console to give users insights on the performance of rich results. With the latest update, Google will remove all the non-supported rich results feature from the Search Console.
Between July 14 and 1 August 2018, the Index coverage news switched to a more accurate version, because of this, many webmasters saw changes in their reported index coverage. The period during the switching, no index data coverage was recorded, and whatever value was reflected was estimated to be known from the August 1 values.
While the Google Search Console tool was still in its beta phase, Google added new features proactively. It is also testing features that could become a part of the new Search Console. Since the news of the new feature rollout, Google has not been offering much besides a few tabs like “Performance,” “Sitemaps,” and “Index Coverage.” However, starting from July 2nd week this year, the “URL Inspection Tool” was also added. This new feature took almost a month to become available to all webmasters.
Google URL Inspection Tool Becomes Part of New Search Console Beta – July 2018
Since the second week of July, webmasters have reported a new tab titled “URL Inspection tool.”
This new feature wasn’t available for all webmasters, until this week. Now, the official word of Google is out, and the new feature has been rolled out universally on all beta versions of “Search Console.”
The new tool comes handy for webmasters to perform an inspection of specific URLs. Once you key in the URL that needs to be inspected, the Console will retrieve data from the Google Index.
The webmasters will be provided with details about the sitemap; this includes the URL and the time and date of the last Google crawl if it has been allowed. Additionally, they can also check whether the page was successfully fetched by a Google bot and indexed with user-declared canonical.
Here are a few other new features that Google added recently to the search console dashboard:
- Sixteen months of traffic data in Search Analytics API
- Recipe report to help users fix structured data issues affecting rich snippets
- New Search Appearance filters in Search Analytics for Weblight and Google Play Instant
Dileep Thekkethil
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Comments
3 Comments
I am facing an issue in submitting my site and page URLs in google search console
Hi there, any ideas why my dashboard of Console looks completely different? I have Performance; there are no search results, google news or discover as in your interface. Any ideas of how this is possible.
I really appreciate any help you can provide.
Jude
I was facing some problems in core web vitals, there is the problem are like largest contentful paint and in products Brand, aggregating, review, Price, etc, How can I resolve this problem sir mind is very off. If you can my help so, please mail me