In case you missed it, in Part 1 we discussed how to set up Search Console by verifying your domain or adding a code snippet. We briefly dsicussed the Overview page, which shows the Performance, Index, Experience, and Enhancements sections. The Search Console is a great way to gain insights from Google about how the search engine sees your website. As a business, it’s important to understand how the site is performing so you can improve your rankings and reach more of your customers.

In our last article, our Nashville web design group began diving the Overview and the top section, Performance. Continuing with the Performance tab, let’s talk a little about the Pages section of the chart. Every page on your website can rank on Google. In fact, they can all rank for different search terms. Many companies only focus on the homepage and neglect other pages, yet each page can serve its own purpose for your customers and Google. So when you see the Queries section and the Pages tab you may put them together to understand which queries are leading to which pages. 

It can be a bit confusing on what section of the Overview page goes with which link on the left navigation. At any point, you can schedule a free consultation with our Nashville web design company and we can understand your goals to give you training or help you make improvements. But the next link in the left navigation also coorelates with the Performance section (and all the other sections) and specifically the Pages tab we discussed. 

Copy the link from one of the pages that are ranking on your website and go to URL Inspection on the left. Paste the page and let Search Console gather information. The results will show you the page is indexed on Google and how well your Enhancements look. Here you can request Google crawl the page in case things have changed. This is important because it may take Google weeks to read through your entire sitemap and recrawl your website. If you have a very large site like some of our Nashville web design clients do it may take Google a long time because they only extend so much crawl budget every week. Last, you can view the crawled page and see the HTML, a screenshot of how Google sees the page, and more technical information.

Back to the Overview, let’s discuss the Index section. Here you can also click to view a Full Report. This will take you to the Pages section under the Index navigation. On this page we can see what pages are indexed, which pages are not, and why. A page being indexed means Google will see it and serve it in the search results. If a page isn’t indexed Google knows not to bother with it. Some businesses may not want a page indexed due to sensitive information or for any reason it is not search related. Limiting indexed pages to relevant pages also helps with the aforementioned crawl budget.

Scroll down to the section to see why pages aren’t indexed. Sometimes you don’t want pages to be found but this also may indicate that there is an issue. A few issues you may see causing a page not to be indexed are an Alternate page with proper canonical tag or a 404 error (not found or soft error). The canonical issue may be intended but it may also be because the website is telling Google two pages are the same and to only look at the first. If you see this and determine it’s an issue for your website, it’s a good time to reach out to our Nashville web design team for a consultation.

Any 404 errors you see means Google cannot find the page. Perhaps the page used to exist and was deleted. If that happens you should add a redirect from the deleted page to another relevant page so your customers aren’t clicking a dead link in search. If your sitemap is updated, which we’ll talk more about soon, these 404 errors will eventually go away on their own but that’s not optimal. 

Click on the 404 error to dive in. Look over the pages to determine how to fix this issue. Once you’re satisfied, click Validate Fix to speed up the process.

Next, you will see a Video Pages link. This works just like pages except Google is indexing all of the videos on your website, even if they are not on a standalone page. A video on your homepage will show up in this section. Google may or may not index it. Ideally you have a separate sitemap for your videos and use schema data to tell Google what those videos are about. This gets into code and is best left to our Nashville web design team after a consultation.

We’ve talkd about Sitemaps a few times. Now click on the Sitemaps tab in the left navigation. By default, Google will crawl through your website whether you have a sitemap or not. Having one just makes it easier for Google and you gain more control over what is being indexed or not. WordPress has many plugins, like Yoast or Rank Math, to help you generate a sitemap. Once it’s done you can link to that map here. 

Finally, let’s briefly look at the Removals navigation. Most businesses won’t use this often but when you need in a pinch, Search Console delivers. This section will remove a URL from Google’s search results quickly. In most cases, this is good for sensitive data or large sites that need indexing and are exceeding Google’s crawl budget on unhelpful search results. 

One example of a good case for the Removals tab is when our Nashville web design company got a call from a client that their employee applications were showing up in the search results. Resumes were being uploaded to the site and indexed by Google. Since Google is smart enough to read PDFs, this was causing a privacy challenge. Our team removed the results immediately and blocked these pages from being indexed using the robots.txt file, which we’ll discuss later.