Google search console or webmaster tools help to analyse about the backlinks, crawl errors, or for adjusting the URL parameters. With every new year, Google gives us new tools, analytics and data to track in Google Search Console.  Here we will learn about the Search appearance, search traffic, Google Index and Crawl.

If you use google webmaster tools together with google analytics, the results will be even better.For every SEO professional Search appearance section in Google Search Console is important. This will tell the secrets of structured data working and if the AMP pages are active or not. Let us see all in details.

Structured Data in google search console

Website owner, local business, the organization understands the woes of implementing structured data. Add the code to the site, but it’s still not showing in the SERPs.  After adding the code to the website, pop into Google Search Console-> Search Appearance-> Structured Data to check for errors.

How to fix the Structure Data in search console?

You can use a local business, blog posts, author, organizations for structured data and there’s something in this report for you. If you use the report, you may begin to see increased CTRs, pages indexed etc. Structured data is not a ranking factor and the site won’t lose the rankings if you leave these errors, it’s better for the user experience is you fix the errors. To fix the error you need to analyze the error individually. 

Rich Cards

Do you remember last time when you searched for the smartphone, movies, jams? You can see a time, place for rich cards in the SERPs. If you are an SEO professional who tracks errors and performance of hard-earned Rich cards, then Google Search Console is the right place to go.Rich cards use schema data to display content in an engaging format to improve the mobile experience.

Rich card report monitors rich snippets, schema, AMP and App Indexing. Once you create Rich cards you can see the report to see what cards are indexed if there are any errors. If you see errors in Google Search console, then Rich cards are not displayed in the SERPs.

Data Highlighter

Rich snippets boost CTR in search results, so it’s essential to websites with book reviews, events and products to use the data highlighter.

• Select Google Search Console Data Highlighter, select start highlights option and click the option that you like to start highlighting.

• Use the mouse to highlight elements on the page and pair them with the required elements.
• When completed, see the list in the Data Highlighter section

HTML Improvements(old version)

Struggling to improve the CTRs? Have you spent the time to improve meta descriptions? With the HTML improvements report, you can improve the on-page SEO. This report displays errors on the metadata. Errors like duplicate titles or description that are long can be seen here. You can find the glimpse of Google viewing the content.

How to fix HTML improvements reports?

This tool is useful for identifying duplicate URL issues that are caused by uppercase variations, duplicate pages etc.

How to fix the issues in the HTML improvement report.

• Duplicate meta: Review each page list to confirm the unique description for each. Sometimes the same page is indexed twice because of URL parameter issues.
• Long and short meta: Manually review each page listed and reduce the length of meta title or description. Use 120-150 characters for description and under 70 characters for titles.
• Missing: You may have forgotten to add meta title or meta description, so add the content.
• Accelerated Mobile Pages(available both in the old and new version)
• To increase the page speed, it turns out Accelerated Mobile Pages(AMP). You can find the AMP report in the old and new version of the Google search console.

How to use AMP Report?

AMP status report in Google search console allows monitoring the AMP pages. Watch site templating, other implementation issues that affect the AMP pages. You AMP test tool to make the big changes. You can also filter the AMP results in the performance report.This report helps you fix errors that prevent your AMP pages from appearing in Google Search results with AMP-specific features.

Search Traffic

Search analytics highlight top performing pages, links to the site that brings outs disavow file and even internal links tell what Google is seeing.

Performance(older version is search analytics)

Search Analytics displays 7, 28 or 90 day summary of how often the website appears in the search results.

On the dashboard, see data that can be broken into the following metrics:

• Queries
• Pages
• Countries
• Devices
• Search type
• Search appearance
• Date

Reports build with search performance in search console?

You can see this data to identify:

• Top performing pages.
• Page with low CTR.
• A number of clicks per keyword.
• A number of impressions per keyword.
• Links to the site

All websites have plenty of high-quality links to every page. Links to the site report in Google search console shows the websites that are linking to you.

How to monitor backlinks in Google Search Console? How to disavow?

• To monitor backlinks in Google search console, follow the steps:
• Dashboard-> Links
• Click on “who links the most”.
• Click “download the latest links” report.
• Identify abnormal patterns of links coming from the first day.

Find the potential harmful backlinks that you want to disavow in Google search console, follow the steps:

• Dashboard-> Links.
• Click on “who links the most”.
• Sort by linked pages.
• Manually investigate the quality of sites linking from one page.
• Use the disavow tool to upload the document of backlinks that you want Google to ignore.

Internal Links

Internal links tell Google what you believe the necessary on the website.

How to use the Internal Links report?

If you are an online shopping company and web page about the women’s apparel’s is the important page to you, but you are linking to the About page the most then you want to revamp the internal linking map.

Manual Actions

What manual actions report in Google Search Console tell us?

You will receive a message in the Manual actions report if you go against Google’s guidelines.

How to remove manual actions in Google Search Console?

If you receive a manual action notice, submit a reconsideration request. Reconsideration request takes time and quick actions from the team. A quick overview of steps to recover from unnatural links to the site:

• Create a link removal campaign to remove all spammy links.
• Use the Google spreadsheet to document the link removal work.
• Submit the disavow file to Google.
• Write a documented letter to explain why this happened and the steps to remove the links.

International Targeting

If the website has multiple languages or targets to a particular country, then you want to have hreflang tags. International Targeting tool in Search Console identifies errors in the hreflang tags.

How to set up the country preferences in Google search console?

Target a particular country, make sure to review the traffic sources by country in Google Analytics before setting a country preference. To set up[ country preferences, follow the steps:

• Google search console-> Search Traffic-> International Targeting-> Country.
• Click the checkbox, be able to choose which country to target.
• If you don’t set up the targeting, Google determines based on the website’s domain, IP addresses, links and information from Google My Business.

Mobile Usability

Mobile Usability Report

Google launched a mobile usability report in Google search console before the announcement of moving to mobile first index. Mobile usability report gives the opportunity to troubleshoot the design and development issues with mobile. 

How to fix mobile usability report issues?

Side-effects of a poorly designed mobile website leave you drowning in low organic traffic and no customers.  Some of the common errors in mobile usability report and how to fix them:

• Content wider than the screen.
• Clickable elements too close together.
• Viewport not configured.
• Google Index

Google Index reports in Google search console helps to find if CSS is blocked or to remove the URLs. This reports in Google search console provides data on how the content is performing in the search console.

 Index coverage(index status-> older version)

Here we can find the site’s URLs that Google has indexed over the past year. Monitor, there are no large increases or decreases in the indexed pages.

• Find index bloat by following the steps:
• Google search console->status-> index coverage.
• Move on to Google and search a site:[insert website URL] search.
• Dig the page of search results to find the pattern in the parameter of each page.

If you notice pages indexed that you don’t want to be indexed, go back and add a noindex tag to each page and add noindex tag to each page.

Blocked resources

This report tells Google what is blocked by the website’s robots.txt directives.

Most common items that are blocked are java script and css. Googlebot can’t render pages using js and may affect the rankings.

How to fix blocked resources?

• Remove them from the disallow section of robots.txt.
• Test the updated robots.txt file in robots.txt tester tool.
• Make sure pages are not using the noindex, nofollow tag.
• Run the URLs through Fetch as Google tool to make sure that is rendered correctly.

Remove URLs

Remove URLs tool helps to temporarily hide something from Google searches, add the URL to remove URLs tool in Google search console.

Use the remove URLs tool.

• Before submitting pages to search console to remove, follow these steps.
• Add a noindex meta tag to each page.
• Insert rel=canonical tag to each page.
• Disallow pages in the robots.txt file.
• Submit to remove URLs.

Crawl

Crawl errors report tell what pages are broken on the website. This report has two sections:

• Site errors: It displays errors from the whole website.
• URL errors: This shows errors from crawling pages on the desktop and mobile site.
• Some standard crawl errors:
• DNS(Domain Name System) error.
• Server error
• Soft 404 errors
• 404 errors

Crawl Stats

Crawl stats section in Google search console look like a hot mess and this data measures your crawl rate. A faster crawl rate means that Google bot is indexing the site quickly and you should see better search performance.

Crawl Status comes with three reports:

i.              Pages crawled per day.

ii.             Kilobytes downloaded per day.

iii.            Time spent downloading a page.

URL Inspection Tool(new)/Fetch as Google(old)

URL inspection tool is similar to Fetch as Google in the old Google search console.

Robots.txt Tester

This helps you to let you know what is blocking Googlebot from URLs on the site.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps report in Google search console shares insights on what is happening on the website.

URL parameters

There exists nothing worse than discovering the website flooded with duplicate content.