DANIEL WAISBERG: Hi.
I'm Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate at Google,
and today I'll talk about how to use Search Console if you're
a developer.
Since the tool provides a lot of information about search
optimization, developers may think it's not useful to them,
but I beg to differ.
In this video, I'll talk about the most useful Search Console
reports to help developers build websites
that are healthy, findable, and optimized for Google search.
In summary, use the Index Coverage Report
to understand sitewide search indexing issues.
Use the URL Inspection Tool to debug page level search
indexing issues.
Use the Security Issues Report to find and fix issues
affecting your site, and use the Core Web Vitals
Report to make sure your website provides a great page
experience for your users.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The first thing that is really important for you to know
is whether Google can find and crawl your pages.
Small glitches can have a massive effect
when it comes to Google bot being able to read websites.
For example, sometimes we see companies
accidentally adding no index tags to entire websites,
or blocking the content from being crawled through an error
on their robot.txt file.
These issues can be easily uncovered
using the Index Coverage Report.
When you open the report, the first page you see
is the Summary page.
The default view shows indexing errors on your website,
but you can click to show valid with warnings,
valid, and excluded pages.
In addition, you will find a checkbox
to add to the main chart the number of impressions
your page has got on search.
Here's what each status means with some examples.
Errors prevent pages from being indexed.
Pages with errors won't appear in Google,
which can mean a loss of traffic to your website.
For example, your page might be returning a 44 or a 500 level
error.
Additionally, you might get an error
if you submitted a page through a site map,
but it contains a no index directive.
All these cases would prevent the page
from appearing on search results.
Valid with warnings are pages that may or may not
be shown on Google, depending on the issue,
but we think there is a problem you should look into.
For example, Google might find pages
that are indexed, though blocked by robot.txt.
This is marked as a warning because it's not clear
if you intended to block the page from search results.
If you do want to block the page,
robot.txt is not the best way to avoid being indexed.
To do so, you should either use a no index directive or request
authentication to see the page.
Valid pages have been indexed and can be shown
on Google Search, so good job.
Excluded pages were not indexed and won't appear in Google.
But either we think that is your intention
or we think it's the right thing to do.
For example, the page has a no index directive, your choice,
or the page is a duplicate of another page, Google's choice.
You can watch the Index Coverage episode in this series
to understand more about the issues affecting your site
and learn how to validate the fix you have implemented.
To debug an issue with a specific page,
for example, a page Google is showing
an error in the Coverage Report, you
should use the Inspect URL tool.
You can use it to learn the current index
status of your pages, to test the live URL,
to ask Google to crawl a specific page,
and to view detailed information about the page's
loaded resources and other information.
You can access the tool from the top bar, from the sidebar,
and you'll also see a little magnifying glass next to URLs
in some reports.
For example, if you drill down to a URL from the Index
Coverage Report, you can click to inspect it.
Once the page displays the results,
you will see three different sections, all
of them presenting information from Google's last crawl
or crawl attempt.
If you recently made changes to the page,
you might want to check if they're
working as intended by clicking Test Live URL
and comparing the live version to the indexed one.
In the presence on Google [? Card, ?]
you'll get a verdict on whether or not
the URL can appear in Google search results.
There are two important options available for developers
in this [? card. ?] First, if you made a change to the page
and want to request Google to reindex it,
use Request Indexing.
Second, you can click View Crawl Page to check the HTML version
that Google indexed and more information on the HTP
response and loaded resources.
In the Coverage section, you'll learn
where the page was discovered, such as a site map or referring
page, when was the last crawl and by which user agent,
and whether the page is included in the Google Index
or another version of it was chosen as the canonical.
In the Enhancements section, you'll
find any structured data details, along with AMP
and mobile usability warnings and errors.
For example, if your page is not marked up properly
with structured data, the inspection
will return an error detailing the missing or wrong values.
You can watch the Inspect URL episode in this series
to learn how to use the tool to debug and fix
any issues you find.
Search Console also includes two reports
that will help you optimize your site's help--
security issues and core web vitals.
The Search Console Security Issues Report
shows warnings when Google finds that your site might have been
hacked or used in ways that could potentially
harm a visitor or their device.
For example, a hacker might inject malicious code
in your pages to redirect your users to another site
or to automatically create pages on your site
with nonsensical sentences filled with keywords.
These are examples of website hacking.
An attacker might also trick users
into doing something dangerous, such as revealing
confidential information or downloading malicious software.
That's called social engineering.
When you log in to Search Console,
you'll already be notified in the Overview page
if you have security issues on your site.
Clicking the alert will lead you to the Security Issues Report,
where you'll find a list of all security issues
Google found in your website.
In the report, you'll find more details
about the type of threat, a sample of pages affected by it,
and a process for you to inform Google when you fix the issues.
I recorded an episode about the security issues report
with [INAUDIBLE],, my colleague from the Trust and Safety team.
Check it out for more details.
Lastly, the Core Web Vitals Report
shows how your pages perform based on real-world usage data,
sometimes called fill data.
The report is based on three metrics.
LCP, or Largest Contentful Paint,
is the amount of time it takes to render
the largest content element visible in the viewport,
starting from when the user requests the URL.
This is important because it tells the reader that the URL
is actually loading.
FID, or First Input Delay, is the time from when a user first
interacts with your page, when they click the link
or tap the button, to the time when the browser responds
to that interaction.
This is important on pages where the user needs to do something,
because this is when the page has become interactive.
CLS, or Cumulative Layout Shift, is the amount
that the page layout shifts during the loading phase.
This score is rated from 0 to 1, where 0 means no shifting and 1
means the most shifting.
This is important because having elements
shift while a user is trying to interact with the page
is very annoying.
I'm sure you will agree.
Log in to Search Console and navigate to the Core Web Vitals
Report.
You'll see that the report is broken down
by mobile and desktop.
Open one of them to see an aggregate report
with more details.
By default, the chart shows trends
for pages with poor performance, but you
can click on Need Improvement and Good
to check their trends too.
Be aware that if a page does not have
a minimum amount of reporting data for any of these metrics,
it is omitted from the report, so you probably
won't see all your pages.
Click an issue on the table to drill down.
In this report, you'll find more details
about the issue, a chart showing trends,
and a table with simple URLs.
Check the links in the description
to find out more about the Core Web Vitals Report.
You might also like to check out tools such as Lighthouse
before you deploy changes to production.
With that, I'll end this video.
It's too long already, and even if you drank coffee
in the beginning, the effect is probably starting to die away.
To recap, use the Index Coverage Report
to understand sitewide search indexing issues.
Use the URL Inspection tool to debug page-level search
indexing issues.
Use the Security Issues Report to find and fix threats
affecting your site, and use the Core Web Vitals
Report to make sure your website provides a great page
experience to your users.
Don't forget to subscribe to the Google Webmasters YouTube
channel to watch our upcoming Search Console videos.
Stay tuned.
[MUSIC PLAYING]