Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool offered by Google that helps you monitor your website’s performance on Google Search. It provides valuable insights into how Google crawls, indexes, and serves websites. With Search Console, you can track your website’s search traffic and performance, identify and fix issues that may affect your website’s visibility on Google Search, and optimize your website’s appearance on search results to attract more relevant traffic.

Your website will already be set up for Google Search Console. To Login, go to https://search.google.com/search-console - if you don't already have access, contact the Sky Websites team: DL-Sky-Websites-Developers@sky.uk

Google Search Console has three main sections: Performance, Indexing, and Experience, with an Overview at the top summarising the main pieces of data from each section.

Performance

This section shows how well your website is performing in Google Search results, plotting a graph showing the number of Impressions (i.e. instances a Page on your site appeared in a Google Search result) and clicks (how many times people visited your site directly from clicking on one of those results).

The table below shows which Queries were popular in generating Impressions and Clicks, which Pages performed the best, and a breakdown of Impressions and Clicks by Country or Device type.

Under the Performance section you can also see a similar breakdown for when your Pages have appeared in Google's 'Discover' section, or in Google News.

Indexing

Google and other search engines rely on a process of indexing to allow users to search and find website pages. To aid this process, sites usually submit a 'Sitemap' which tells Search Engines how the site is structured, and give it instructions on how to index it, or which pages to exclude.

The Indexing section gives a report on how much content has been indexed, and which ones haven't along with a reason why (e.g. Google found a duplicate version of the page, or there was a specific instruction not to index that page).

There is also a 'Video Indexing' section which specifically breaks down how many videos Google has discovered on your site and which ones it has indexed. It may be that many of your videos aren't appropriate for indexing, such as an auto-play video on a Hero or Carousel, whereas the sorts of videos you want to be discoverable will be hosted on YouTube and embedded into your site so won't appear on this report.

The 'Sitemap' and 'Removals' sections are where you can manage what content Google is allowed to index. We automatically generate a Sitemap for your site (you can view this by navigating to your site and putting /sitemap.xml at the end of the address), and on this screen you can see when it was last read. If you've made lots of changes to your site in a short period of time you might want to resubmit the Sitemap to Google to make sure those new Pages are discoverable on Google Search as soon as possible.

In the 'Removals' section you can manually manage removing individual Pages or entire sections of your Site from Google Searches.

Note: this functionality is only for temporary removals, which normally only last for 6 months and only applies to Google.

If you want to permanently remove a Page from all search engines, use the 'Hide from Search Engines' button in the CMS when creating a Page. This will add the Page to your 'Robots.txt' file, which is how Search Engines are instructed on which Pages to not include in their index.

Note: The Robots.txt file is publicly available so using this functionality does not mean your Page cannot be found, and any user can easily see what Pages have been put on a Robots.txt file for a website.

Experience

The Experience section gives a report on how Google rates the structure of the content on your site, and whether it provides a good experience for Desktop or Mobile users. It considers factors such as load time, or whether the text is too small to read.

This feature is not particularly reliable, and Google have announced that major changes are being made to it in the near future.