In Google Hangout on Google+ from last week, Google's John Mueller said at the 54:15 mark that links found within the link tool in the Google Search Console are within Google's index. Simon in the hangout asked about it because he believed that often, those links are not in Google's index. Simon asked:In search console when you look at your inbound links, you'll often see a number of pages in there that link to you that are actually in the search index. I don't know why that is and maybe some content is cached or style or whatever. But i think you said in the past, if a page isn't in the search index and even if it's in search console it won’t contribute to any kind of algorithmic penalty filter anything like that. Is still the case?In which Google's John Mueller responded that those links should be in the Google index. John said:We should have these pages in our index if they're listed as links in search console. I mean one aspect that could be happening there is that a page … [Read more...] about Google: Links Found In Google Search Console Are In Google’s Index
Search console
Google Data Studio Now Connects With Google Search Console Data
Google added a new "Data Studio connector for Search Console," Google said. "With this launch users can pull their data into Data Studio to build reports that include impressions, clicks, and average position broken out by keyword, date, country, and device," Google added. Search Console users can now build Data Studio reports to understand how their search traffic changes over time, where traffic is coming from, and what search queries are most likely to drive traffic to their sites. Users can also filter reports for mobile traffic to improve mobile targeting, and to analyze clickthrough rates for various organic search terms.As always, Data Studio report creators can add components from other data sources into a single report. With this new connector, users can use the Search Console and AdWords connectors to compare performance across paid and organic search, or add Google Analytics data to analyze site-side performance. Note that Search Console metrics can be aggregated by either … [Read more...] about Google Data Studio Now Connects With Google Search Console Data
How To Find Google Featured Snippets Using SEMrush And Google Search Console (GSC)
The trend is clear: Google is providing more and more answers directly in the search results (SERPs). Answers in the SERPs come in many forms, and some provide content sourced from a website, along with a link to find more information. These are actually called featured snippets, as Google’s Gary Illyes recently explained. For example, here’s a featured snippet from the Bose website: Many people involved in SEO have mixed emotions about featured snippets. They can be valuable for users, and they can help build credibility for publishers — but it’s also scary as heck to see your content lifted and placed directly in the SERPs. I’ve seen some of my own blog posts yield featured snippets, and I can tell you it’s a strange experience. It’s exciting and frightening at the same time. For example, if you can gain a featured snippet, you can stand out from the crowd. And if Google is providing a link to your site for more information, that snippet can … [Read more...] about How To Find Google Featured Snippets Using SEMrush And Google Search Console (GSC)
How To Find Queries Per URL Using The Search Analytics Report In Google Search Console (GSC)
When analyzing Google organic traffic to your site, it’s important to understand both the queries leading to your site and which pages are ranking for those queries. By doing so, you can start to determine how users are searching for the topic at hand and the differences in query by device. You also can discover new subtopics that can drive future content generation. Although this makes sense, I know there is a lot of confusion over how to drill into that data using Google Search Console (GSC). We all know that having access to search query data directly from Google is valuable, but a lot has changed recently in GSC, and new reporting and functionality can be confusing for webmasters and business owners. So today I’m going to walk you through the new Search Analytics report to find queries leading to specific URLs. This will enable you to isolate a blog post, article or product page, and then find all queries leading to that URL. (Actually, it will show you most of the … [Read more...] about How To Find Queries Per URL Using The Search Analytics Report In Google Search Console (GSC)
Use Google’s Search Console API & Pivot Tables To Supercharge Your Long-Tail SEO
Google’s recent changes to their Search Console API have allowed for interesting data analysis via Impressions and Clicks data. Leveraging the power of Excel and Pivot Tables, an unprecedented level of detail is available to fine-tune your search marketing campaign. Querying The Queries Google’s API documentation has excellent code samples and query structure guidance, and it should be considered essential reading for any SEO looking to push data to the fore in their SEO strategies. For today’s article, I’m going to cover the “Search Analytics: query” section, which explains how to use the Search Console API to query your search traffic. The API allows segmentation of your data that mimics much of the functionality in the web interface. So, why not just perform analysis in the web interface? Because by extracting the data, we can further filter it to gain real granular insight. In doing this through the API, we can automate repeating that analysis. … [Read more...] about Use Google’s Search Console API & Pivot Tables To Supercharge Your Long-Tail SEO
The terrifying connection between malware, Google Search Console, rogue subdomains and AdWords
Security warnings in Google Search Console (GSC) can be scary. Really scary. Whether your site was flagged for being hacked, serving malware, unwanted software or worse, security warnings in GSC can cause serious problems for your organization. First, your site can be harming users. That’s bad enough. Second, your organic search traffic can plummet as Google takes action against your site (either manually or algorithmically). For example, your site can be labeled in the SERPs as being hacked or being a site that can harm your computer. In addition, with Google Safe Browsing, users might see the red screen of death in their browser as they try to visit your site. As you can guess, this can create serious barriers between users and your website content. And with all of the buzz in the news about hackers, malware, phishing and more, you can bet that many users will not break through those security barriers and visit your site. They will often simply move on to another site that … [Read more...] about The terrifying connection between malware, Google Search Console, rogue subdomains and AdWords
How to download all of your landing pages from Google Search Console via Analytics Edge — and I mean ALL of them!
Google Search Console (GSC) is powerful and provides a boatload of data directly from Google. One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Search Analytics report, which enables you to drill into queries that your site ranks for and the landing pages ranking for those queries, then slice and dice that information by device, country, date and more. You can also compare queries, pages, countries and devices by date, which is extremely helpful when diagnosing surges or drops in traffic. When analyzing websites, I often export data from GSC to Excel for further analysis. For example, when helping companies with website redesigns or CMS migrations, it’s important to have a solid understanding of all landing pages ranking for queries and receiving Google traffic. You can find that data in the Search Analytics reporting by selecting the Pages group. See below. There’s a nifty Download button at the bottom of the report which enables you to export a spreadsheet with your landing page … [Read more...] about How to download all of your landing pages from Google Search Console via Analytics Edge — and I mean ALL of them!
Recent changes to organic sitelinks cause major drops in impressions in Google Search Console
Google recently made some under-the-radar changes to sitelinks in the organic search results. The first change removed small sitelinks from below regular organic blue links that render for high search volume queries (Google has since fixed this glitch). The second change adjusted the number of large sitelinks being displayed for branded searches (this is most likely a test). Even though it does not look like either of these changes will have a significant impact on traffic, they have caused dramatic fluctuations in impressions and average position in Google Search Console (GSC). If you experienced that moment of panic when you did your last GSC check-in, take a look at this article to better understand: what happened with sitelinks in the search results. what effects the changes had on GSC data. how to check your site for declines. what the changes mean for SEO. What happened to sitelinks? Google made two changes that reduced the number of sitelinks being shown on search engine … [Read more...] about Recent changes to organic sitelinks cause major drops in impressions in Google Search Console
How to improve your CTR using Google Search Console
Last month I wrote a comprehensive guide on how to use Google Search Console, covering every aspect of what is essentially a giant toolshed full of useful stuff for all webmasters to use. It was exhaustive, and probably exhausting. Don’t read the whole thing in one sitting, just dip in and out when you come across something you’re unsure about. While wading through Search Console’s huge amount of features, I noticed a few elements that deserved to be highlighted, not only because I had no idea they existed or were even accessible to webmasters, but also because they may be able to help raise your click-through rate (CTR) on search engine results pages (SERPs), or at the very least, show you where to improve. The first thing you need to be aware of is this… You can see all the search queries that bring traffic to your site in Search Console. Yeah it was a massive pain when Google encrypted your search terms Google Analytics and replaced them with the ambiguous … [Read more...] about How to improve your CTR using Google Search Console
Google Search Console: a complete overview
The Search Console (or Google Webmaster Tools as it used to be known) is a completely free and indispensably useful service offered by Google to all webmasters. Although you certainly don’t have to be signed up to Search Console in order to be crawled and indexed by Google, it can definitely help with optimising your site and its content for search. Search Console is where you can monitor your site’s performance, identify issues, submit content for crawling, remove content you don’t want indexed, view the search queries that brought visitors to your site, monitor backlinks… there’s lots of good stuff here. Perhaps most importantly though, Search Console is where Google will communicate with you should anything go wrong (crawling errors, manual penalties, increase in 404 pages, malware detected, etc.) If you don’t have a Search Console account, then you should get one now. You may find that you won’t actually need some of the other fancier, … [Read more...] about Google Search Console: a complete overview