Since this week there are changes in the Google Search Console. On the one hand, the data for the index coverage has been improved, on the other hand, Google announced to have introduced a new feature in the form of a Google News performance report.
Improved data in the index coverage
Based on user feedback, Google decided to make improvements to the index coverage report in their Search Console. Users should now be able to better understand why some pages are not crawled or indexed by Google. The improvements should lead to a better overview of the existing errors on the website and help to solve them.
Improvements that have been made are for example:
- The generic name of “crawl anomaly” has been removed – all crawl errors should now be described in a more specified way.
- Pages submitted but blocked by robots.txt (error) are now delivered as “Indexed but blocked” (warning)
- Added a new error: “Indexed without content” (warning)
- The report for Soft 404 errors is now more specific
These changes can be found in the index coverage report from now on.
Available now: Google News Performance Report
Another new feature in Google Search Console: the Google News Performance Report.
This is intended to give news publishers and web publishers a better impression of user behavior on Google News on the apps for iOS, Android or the news.google.com. The new section is displayed in the Google Search Console on the left navigation page.
According to Google, the report includes metrics such as impressions, clicks and click-through rate and is designed to answer the following questions from web publishers:
- How often did my article show up to users in Google News?
- Which articles performed well in Google News?
- How does the user behavior of my readership differ from country to country?
This report is available for every web page in Google News and is intended to complement the existing Search Console reports.
