Google Search Console: 15 Top Interesting FAQs

Google Search Console: Frequently Asked Questions

 

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console (aka google webmaster tools) is a set of tools and reports that allow webmasters or anyone who operates a website really able to monitor, manage, and improve their websites. It is a web service provided by Google free of charge. Google Console Account gives you information about your website and the people who visit it. GSC is being used by bloggers, SEO’s, marketers, webmasters, etc. Using google webmaster tools and the analytical data that is provided by it can make optimizing your website a lot easier. Further, It needs to be used to push your SEO even further.

Why Should I Care About Google Console Account?

Google Webmaster Tools helps you understand how people find your website, so you can make changes to improve its performance. This includes things like fixing broken links, making sure your site loads quickly, and ensuring that your site has relevant content.

Google Webmaster Tools Account is one of the most important tools for optimizing your website. If you want to rank higher in Google searches, then you should definitely take advantage of GSC. The tool allows you to track your rankings, view keywords that drive traffic to your site, and find ways to improve your content.

GSC account is one of the most important tools for optimizing websites, especially if you want to rank well organically. The tool allows you to track user behavior on your website, such as what keywords people use to find your content, how often they visit your site, and whether they click on links from other websites.

What are primary advantages of Google Webmaster Tools Account?

It is an invaluable tool for everyone to

• monitor their website’s performance in search results.
• Content accessibility.
• Malware and spam issues.
• It’s really a one-stop-shop to keep your site in front of potential visitors.

How to Set up Google Search Console?

Here are 5 Steps to Setup google webmaster tools. They are

• Sign in to Your Google Account
• Open up Google Webmaster Tools (Aka GSC Home Page)
• Add a New Website to Console or Or alternatively, in the dropdown, click “+ Add property”
• Add Your Domain
• Verify Your Account (+ Alternative Methods)

Therefore,

• Google Webmaster Tools Login can be done using either an existing Google account or sign-up an account to access the GSC Account.

What Google Webmaster Tools can do for my website?

You can use GSC to do the following.

• Submit your website to Google search
• Helps you to request the search engine regarding indexing of your website
• Control crawling and indexing of the website
• Find broken links to the website
• A lot of options for Technical SEO

How do I access the Google Webmaster Tools tool?

Which structured data type reports are available in Google Search Console?

The structured data type reports available in Console are

• Breadcrumbs
• Events
• FAQ
• How-to
• Job Postings
• Logos
• Products
• Sitelinks search box
• Video

What kind of reports are available in Google Search Console?

Here are the reports available in the new Search Console Account:

• Index report: These GSC reports how well is Google indexing your website.
• Overview report: the overall performance of your site.
• URL inspection: From a technical point of view, how certain pages are performing wrt to other pages of the website.
  
• Performance report: how your pages are performing
• Link report: your external and internal links

What are the features of Google Search Console?

To explore the features of Google Search Console Account, set up an account & verify your website with Search Console. There is a range of different reports you can access. They are designed to provide varying insights into your site. Below, you will find a brief rundown of what you can find within each report.

• Overview Report
• Performance Report
• Index Coverage
• Index Sitemaps
• Enhancements report
• Mobile Usability Report
• AMP Report
• Manual Actions Report
• Links Report

How to use Keywords Everywhere with Google Search Console??

• First, make sure you install the Keywords Everywhere browser add-on.
• go to Google Search Console
• Select your website and then go to “Search Traffic” -> “Search Analytics“.
• If you have the addon installed correctly, you will find the two metrics as new columns – Monthly Volume, CPC and competition in the table with the data. These columns show the metrics you want to see.
  

How to see the FAQ report in Google Search Console?

Google launched a Google Search Console enhancement report called FAQ structured data. FAQ report is an enhancement report present in Google Search Console. It monitors FAQ issues & shows all errors, warnings, and valid FAQ items related to your marked-up FAQ pages. It also shows you a search appearance of it.

What is the “How-to” report in Google Search Console?

The how-to report is a Google Search Console report. GSC How-To Report is an enhancement report in Search Console that shows you website errors, warnings and valid items for pages with HowTo structured data.

How to Getting started with Google search console?

To get access to Google Search Console, add your domain name to GSC and prove that you own that domain. This is pretty easy as Google provides 5 ways to let you do that. here are the steps to do that.

• First, Go to the Google search console home page.
• Login using your existing Google account username & password.
• From the dropdown click on + add property.
• On the left-hand side, Under domain, please enter your domain name. This property adds all your sub-domain, HTTP and HTTPs type as well.
• Then, you can verify the domain ownership by any of the options specified by google.
  

How to Setting Up Google Search Console?

To get access to google search console all you need to do is either verify your website with Google or verify the property of GSC with Google. Here a property may be a domain, subdomain or particular path of a website.

What are the ways to verify a website in Google Search Console?

Based on the URL you wish to verify, There are different methods to verify ownership of a website in Google Search Console. They are

• HTML file: In this approach, Use it upload an HTML file to your website.
• HTML tag: In this approach, add a meta tag to your website’s homepage.
• Google Analytics: In this approach, use your Google Analytics account to verify it.
  
• Google Tag Manager: In this approach, we use your Google Tag Manager account.
• DNS

How to add a sitemap to Google Search Console tool?

To expedite the Indexing process of the whole site do always submit the site map of the website.
By submitting a site map, you provide Google Search Console Account with your site’s publicly available page URLs and image metadata.

• First, Go to the Console dashboard.
• Select the website you would like to index from the property menu in the top left corner of the website.
• Click on Sitemaps.
• Under Add a new sitemap, type sitemap.xml.
• Click on Submit to request Google index your web site.

What are the advantages of Search Console Account?

The advantages of google webmaster tools are

• It includes a set of tools that give you an insight into your website.
• Give you insight into how your search results affecting its rise or decline in the rankings.
• Helps to fix potential issues that could be contributing to a decline in rankings.
• It shows you how the search engine giant crawls and indexes your website
• Show you how your website appears in google search results.
• It helps you monitor, maintain, and improve your ranking in those search results.
• Helps to check Analytics such as which keywords driving traffic to your website.
• It can help you to view the top keywords in the Google Search Keywords panel. keyword analytics likely has a delay of 72hrs to appear.
• It provides a way to Request Google to index your website. so that, Google’s bots review your website and help update search results with your new content.

What are the requirements to use Google Search Console?

In order to use the Console Account, users require a valid Google account. Logging in to this takes place by entering the right e-mail address and password. After this entire website, subdomains, directories, individual subpages or apps can be registered in the console.

The website must first be confirmed to ensure that the corresponding functions are available. Google offers various methods for this. This allows the website to be confirmed with the help of a valid Analytics account. The uploading of your own HTML file to the server is also possible. A safer method is also the insertion of a meta element into the <head> area of the site.

Ensure the successful confirmation of the website. So that the data from the google webmaster tools can be linked to the data of Google Analytics. It is allowing the analysis options to be expanded.

What are the 2 different types of owners?

Verified Owner

A verified owner of a property means the property verification process of owner has been already completed successfully.

Delegated Owner

where as, a delegated owner has been added by a verified owner. Also, note that Delegated owners may add other delegated owners as per their needs.

How many types of roles are available in Google Webmaster Tools?

There are three types of GSC roles available. They are Owners, Users, Associate.

Owner

As An owner, he has full control over his properties in GSC. They may add and remove other users, change the settings, view all data, and access every feature of the tool as per owner’s wish.

User

A user can see all data and can take some actions, but a user can’t add other new users.
Full users can see most of the data and can take some actions, while restricted users can only view most data.

Associate

There is a third role ie an associate. You can associate a Google Analytics property with a Google Search Console account. GA property will let you see GSC data in GA reports. Likewise, You can also access GA reports in two sections of Search Console. They are
1. links to your site,
2. Sitelinks.

Does a GA Property can associate with more than one site?

No. A GA property associate only with one website.

Do I really Need a Sitemap?

A sitemap is not necessary to show up in Google search results. As long as your website pages are logically linked to each other, Google says its web crawlers will normally find most of your pages.

How a sitemap will improve my website’s crawlability?

There are four situations where a sitemap may improve the website’s crawlability. They are mentioned below.

When A Website Is Really Big

The more webpages you have in your website, The crawlers such as Googlebot likely to miss any changes (or) additions of your website.

When it has lots of “isolated” pages

Any page that has few inbound links from other webpages is harder for a web crawler to discover them.

When it is a new website

Newer sites have only few backlinks from other websites making them less discoverable.

When website uses rich media content and/or shows up in Google News

In these cases, your sitemap makes it easier for Google to format & display a website in search.

Once you have built your website sitemap, do submit it using the GSC sitemaps tool.

How to use GSC Sitemaps Report?

After Google has processed and indexed a sitemap of a website, it will appear in the GSC Sitemaps report. You will be able to see when Google last read your sitemap & how many URLs has been indexed.

What are the Filters of Google Search Console?

The filters provided in Google Webmaster Tools are incredibly handy. They help us in several ways to view & parse the website data. These are mentioned below for you.

Search Type

There are 3 different search types. They are mentioned below.
1. web,
2. image,
3. video.
Based on the type of website, you typically get traffic for it.
For example, if you get a lot of traffic from either image or video search, then do make sure you adjust the above filters accordingly.

Search type in Google Search Console Image

Further, You can also compare two different types of traffic. Just click the “Compare” tab, choose the two categories you are interested in, and select “Apply.”
This can lead to some interesting insightful findings. For example, a particular webpost is getting more impressions from image search than web search. However, the latter is still generating more clicks than the other.

google search console web vs image impressions Image

Date Range

Google Webmaster Tools offers around 16 months of website data starting from Most Recent Date of Today. You can choose either from a variety of pre-set time periods (or) set a custom range.

google search console date range selector Image

As with every search type, you may also compare one date range with the other data range in the “Compare” tab.

What other filters you we create in Performance Page?

Queries, Page, Country, Device & Search Appearance

How to create other types of filters?

Click “New” link next to the Date filter to add up to five other types of filters: query, page, country, device, and search appearance.

google search console performance – “new” very next to the date filter Image

These filters can be layered.
For example lets take below scenario.
You wanted to see data for SEO Related queries appearing on a mobile search. Then, add a filter for queries containing “SEO” on mobile devices.
If you wanted to limit the search results even further to web posts on the Marketing Blog, it would be better to add another filter for webpages containing the URL “auniqueweb.com/blog/marketing”.

I would recommend you to use different combinations of filters, so you see what is possible.

How to use Index Coverage Report?

The index coverage report shows you the status of every webpage Google has tried to index on your website. Using Index Coverage Report, you can diagnose indexing issues. Each webpage is assigned one of four statuses. They are

Error

The webpage of a website couldn’t be indexed.

Warning

The webpage is indexed, but it has a problem.

Excluded

The page is an alternate page with duplicate content with a canonical page. For the same reason, that page has been purposefully excluded, where as the canonical page has been found & indexed.

Submitted Sitemaps

Here, you can make your website sitemap available to Google bots and see the results of crawling status.

How to Identify highest Traffic pages of a website?

1. Click on Performance.
2. Click the “Page” tab which is next to Queries.
3. To get a full year’s comprehensive overview of your website traffic, You may Change the date range to “Last 12 months”. (feel free to adjust the date range as per your requirement.)
4. Ensure “Total clicks” is selected.
5. Click the small downward arrow icon next to “Clicks” to sort it out from highest to lowest.

google search console pages report image

How to Identify highest CTR queries?

1. Click Performance link.
2. Click on the “Queries” tab.
3. Change the date range to “Last 12 months” or adjust it as per your requirement
4. Make sure “Average CTR” is selected.
5. Click on the small downward arrow next to “CTR” to sort from the highest to lowest.
Note: It’s very useful to look this against “Total Impressions” to get the full picture of both data points.

google search console pages report with impressions and ctr Image

How to look at average CTR?

1. Click the Performance.
2. Click the date to whatever range you’re interested in. (Alternatively, You may click “Compare” to analyze two date ranges at once.)
3. Look at “Average CTR”.
4. Click on Performance.
5. Click the date & choose what ever date range you are interested in. (Or click “Compare” for analyzing two different date ranges for once.)
6. Look at “Total impressions”.
7. Go to the Status > Performance.
8. Click the date & as per your choose your date range requirement. (Alternatively, click on “Compare” link to analyze two selected date ranges at once.)
9. Look at “Average position”.
google search console average ctr Image

How to Monitor the CTR over period of time?

Always keep an eye on CTR as Any significant movement is worth to understand it further.

Lets assume 2 scenarios. If CTR is dropped, yet impressions have gone up, it mean you are simply ranking for more number of keywords. Thus, average CTR has declined. If CTR has increased, yet impressions have been decreased, It meant that you have lost keywords. If both CTR & impressions have gone up, It means that your website is performing well.

How to Monitor impressions over a period of time?

As you create more content & optimize your existing webpages, this number should increase. In case you decided to target a small number of high conversion keywords rather than a lot of average conversion keywords, It means you are focusing on other channels to improve the engagement of visitors.

How to monitor average position over period of time?

This metric is not that useful & users may ignore it in most of their analysis. Read below the valid reason for it to ignore. Lets assume, If a webpage or a set of pages starts ranking for additional keywords, usually average position likely to increase.

google search console average position Image

How to Identify Highest Ranking webpages?

1. Switch to Performance.
2. Click “Page”
3. Change the date range to “Last 28 days.” as you wanna see accurate snapshot of your pages or you want an up-to-date information.
4. Make sure that the “Average position” is selected.
5. Click the upward arrow adjacent to “Position”. It helps to sort from from smallest (good) to highest (bad).
6. Click Performance.
7. Click the “Page” tab.
8. Change the date range to the following. “Last 28 days”. As you wanna see an up to date & accurate snapshot of your webpages.
9. Make sure “Average position” is selected.
10. Click the small downward arrow next to “Position” to sort from highest (bad) to lowest (good).

Because you are looking at average position by URL, the number mentioned is the mean of all of that webpage’s rankings. To understand it further, Lets assume that it is ranking for two keywords. Though It is ranking at #1 for a high volume query, the other keyword is ranking for #43 for a low volume query Thus, the average becomes 22 ranking in google

Therefore, It is not wise to judge the success or failure of a webpage by “average position” alone.

How to Identify lowest-ranking pages of a website?

The procedure mentioned above is for identify ranking pages. Follow the above steps as it is except this time toggling the small upward arrow next to “Position” to sort the data from the highest (bad) to smallest (good).

How to Identify increasing and decreases in ranking position?

1. Click Performance tab.
2. Move to the “Query” tab.
3. Click “Date range” to change the dates & choose the “Compare” tab.
4. Select two equivalent time periods as per choices which you would like to compare, then click “Apply.”
Now, Either you may look at the data or export it. For an in-depth analysis, It is always highly recommend to export data from GSC.

To export the data, click on the downward arrow beneath the “Search Appearance”, And then download it as a CSV file or export it to your Google Sheets account.

Download csv in google search console Image

Further, in the downloaded data of spreadsheet form, you may add a column for the position differences (Last 28 days Position – Previous 28 days Position), then sort it by the size parameter.

If the difference is positive, your website has been moved up for the query. If it’s negative, It means website is dropped.

How to Identify your highest-traffic queries?

1. Click on Performance.
2. Click the “Query” tab.
3. Click “Date range” to choose a time period of your choice.
4. Make sure that that the following “Total clicks” has been selected.
5. Click the small downward arrow next to “Clicks” to sort the data from highest to lowest.
6. Knowing which queries bring in the most search traffic is definitely useful. Consider to optimize the ranking pages for more conversion. Periodical updating of content of these high ranking pages helps us to maintain their rankings. High ranking pages Put paid promotion behind them. Thus using them to link to lower-ranked relevant pages, and so on.

How to Compare your website’s search performance across desktop, mobile, and tablet?

1. Click the Performance tab.
2. Go to the “Devices” tab.
3. Make sure all the following “Total clicks,” “Total impressions,” “Average CTR,” and “Average Position” are selected.
4. Compare the performance of website across all search types names desktop, mobile, and tablet.

How to Compare my website’s search performance across different countries?

1. Click on Performance to Go to the “Countries” tab.
2. Make sure that following “Total clicks,” “Total impressions,” “Average CTR,” & “Average Position” search types are selected.
3. Now, Compare your website’s performance across all nations.

How to know how many number of webpages have been indexed in google?

1. Click “Overview.”
2. Scroll down to the Index coverage summary section.
3. Look at the count of “Valid pages”.

index coverage in google search console Image

How to learn which webpages have not been indexed and why?

1. Go to Overview >> Index coverage.
2. Scroll down to the Details box.
3. GSC Details Box will list out information of the Errors which are causing indexing issues and how frequent they are.
4. Double-click on any Error type to see the affected webpage URLs.

Where to look for total number of indexed pages and indexing errors?

1. Click on Overview
2. Go to “Index coverage” section of window
3. Make sure the following “Error”, “Valid with warnings”, “Valid”, and “Excluded” are selected.

index coverage drilldown in google search console Image

The total number of indexed pages on your website should typically go up over a period of time as you

a) Publish new blog posts, create new landing pages, add additional website pages, etc.
b) Fix indexing errors of website

For Example, Assume indexing errors of webpages go up significantly very high, it means a website template may have caused the issue. As a large set of webpages have been impacted at once, it must be fixed these issues as soon as possible.

Or if you summited a sitemap with URLs to google. Google can’t crawl. It may be because of ‘noindex’ directives, robots.txt, password-protected pages, etc.).

Assume, If the total number of indexed web pages on your website drops without a proportional increase in errors, it is possible that you are blocking access to existing URLs in one or the way.

In this scenario, You must try to diagnose the issues just by looking at your excluded pages and looking for clues to fix the issues.

How to Identify mobile usability issues?

1. Click Mobile Usability.
2. Make sure that “Error” is also selected.
3. Scroll down to the Details box. GSC Details box helps you to learn which Errors are causing mobile usability issues and how frequent they are causing issues.
4. Double clicking on an Error type helps you to see the affected page URLs.
mobile usability in google search console Image

How to see the total number of backlinks of your website?

1. Click on Links.
2. Now, Open the report of Top linked pages.
3. See the box with the label “Total external links”
4. Click the downward arrow very next to “Incoming links”. It helps to sort records from the highest to the lowest backlinks.

top linked pages externally in google search console Image

Usually, Every backlink of a website is a signal to Google that your content is trustworthy & useful. In fact, the more backlinks the better it is. Of course, quality matters here. One link from a high Authority website is much more valuable than two links from A Low Authority websites. To see which websites are linking to a specific webpage of website, simply do Double Click the URL in the report.

How to spot the URLs that have the most backlinks?

1. Click the Links.
2. Open the report labeled Top linked pages .
3. Click the downward arrow next to “Incoming links”. It is going to sort data from highest to lowest backlinks of webpage.
If you wanna rank a webpage higher in SERP results, do add a link from the webpage that has a ton of backlinks. This approach is a good one to accomplish the task. Those backlinks give the URL the page authority it needed. It can then pass on to another webpage of your website with a link.

top sites linking to this page in google search console Image

How to know which websites link to your website the most?

1. Initially, Do Click on Links.
2. Now, Do Scroll down & to the following section “Top linking sites”.
3. Further, Go to “More”
Please note, Knowing the top referring domains of a website is incredibly useful for the promotion. Whenever you plan do a link building campaign, It is always recommend to start with these initial websites. To make this more easier you may use either tools like Moz, SEMrush (or) A rel=”noopener” target=”_blank” that will help you to filter out the Low Authority websites.

How to Identify the most popular anchor text for the external links?

1. Click Links.
2. Please Scroll down to “Top linking text” section & then, click on “More.”
Usually, Anchor texts should be descriptive as well as specific too. At times, you may include your keyword too. If you find websites linking to your webpages, but using anchor texts like “Click Here”, “Learn More”, “Check it out here”, etc.. In this scenario, do consider to send a email asking them to update the hyperlink.

How to Identify which pages have the most internal links?

1. Click on Links.
2. Scroll down to “Top linked pages” & “More.”

What are the advantages of having most internal links to a webpage?

It is very normal for some web URLs to have more inbound links.
For example, Let’s assume you have a e-commerce site. Every product page in a category will always link back to the overview page. It is a good thing as it tells Google your Top Level URLs are the most important & helps them to rank higher.

However, a heavily optimized link distribution is not going to be ideal for the cause. If a tiny percentage of your web URLS are getting way more links than the rest, it will be difficult for the 95% to receive search traffic. It is because you are not passing enough authority to those links.

Further, Use Google Webmaster Tools link data to learn the following.
1. how your weblinks are distributed.
2. And, if you wish to make your weblink distribution further smooth.

How to know how many total internal links your website has?

1. Click Links.
2. Do Scroll down to “Top linked pages”
3. Then, click on “More.”
4. Look at the box labeled named “Total internal links”.

How to Find and fix AMP errors?

1. Click on AMP.
2. Also, Make sure “Error” is selected.
3. Scroll down to the “Details” box
4. Now, See which types of issues you have and how frequent they are.
5. Usually Google recommends fixing errors before looking at the webpages in the “Valid with warnings” category. By default, errors are ranked by their severity, frequency, & whether you have addressed them.

How To Optimize Your Website for Google Webmaster Tools?

Google Webmaster Tools is an essential tool for anyone who wants to optimize their website for search engines. Use this free service to improve your website rankings. The Google Webmaster Tools dashboard provides information on how well your website is performing in terms of traffic, page speed, and other factors that affect your SEO (search engine optimization).

Set up your account

If you haven’t set up your GSC account yet, do so now. You’ll need to sign into your Google Account first. Then click “Webmasters” at the top right corner of the screen. Click “Add new property.” Enter your domain name and select “Website”. Select “Google Analytics” as the property type. Choose “Basic” as the property’s settings. Finally, enter your web address in the “Address” field.

Check your crawl errors

Once you’ve entered your website URL, you’ll see a list of errors. These are things that Googlebot has encountered while crawling your site. It might say something like “404 Not Found”, “500 Internal Server Error”, or “301 Moved Permanently”. This means that there was some kind of error when Googlebot tried to access your site.

Find out what keywords people are searching for

You should also check the keywords that people are using to find your site. If you’re not ranking well for those terms, then you need to make changes to your site so that it’s more likely to show up in search results.

Analyze your traffic data

Once you’ve set up your account, you’ll see a list of pages indexed by Googlebot. This will help you identify any issues with your site that might be preventing it from being found.

Submit your sitemap

You should submit a sitemap.xml to Google so that it can crawl your entire site. If you’re using WordPress, there’s a plugin called Yoast SEO that makes this easy.