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The New Features Added In Google Search Console

The New Features Added In Google Search Console featured image
31 Mar 2020
Nirlep Patel
Google Search Console

Google Search Console is an efficient web tool provided by Google that allows webmasters to rectify indexing status and optimize the visibility of their websites. Google released a new version of the search console in January 2018 that enhanced user interface.

In this blog, we have mentioned the recent and advanced features that Google has added in the Google search console in recent past. Let us find out what they are!

1. Change of Address Tool and Reminder Feature:

Recently, Google has included two new features to the Change of Address tool in the Google Search Console that will let you move your site. These new yet advanced features include Redirect validation and a Reminder feature. Let us have a look at these new features at a glance.

Redirect Validation: The feature is exclusively included for the top 5 URLs of the moving domain. However, the tool will efficiently display the redirect flow and validate the flow while providing some samples. It will also offer you a few recommendations regarding problem redirects.

Reminder: Now, Google will display a reminder at the top part of both the moving and destination in Google Search Console. However, you can easily see this reminder in a warning box that may show a message ‘ This site is moving to newdomaingoeshere.com’.

2. Review Snippets, Performance, Testing Report & Enhancement:

Google has introduced new and advanced reports within Google Search Console that will help you with reviewing snippets. Let us see what these reports have to talk about.

Rich Snippet Enhancement Report: So, the report is available for all those sites who have been incorporating ratings or reviews structured data. The enhancement report will let you see warnings, errors, and valid pages for the markup. Also, if you ever feel to fix other improvement reports, Google’s advanced will assist you through the report fixing process without any flaw.

Rich Snippet Performance Report: The report helps to see your rating or review all marked-up pages on Google Discover and Google Discover. It can be done with the search appearance filter called ‘Review Snippet’. With this, you can anytime determine the clicks, impressions, as well as, the CTR of the results. Moreover, you can also make deep filters in various queries and parameters.

Review Snippet in results tests: In the rich results testing tool, Google has recently added a support feature especially for reviewing rich snippets.

3. New URL Removals Tool:

The advanced feature introduced within Google Search Console temporarily blocks URLs that do not get shown in Google. However, it shows outdated content along with the filtered content by SafeSearch. The URL removals tool helps you to-

  • Temporarily hide URLs from getting displayed in Google Search
  • Shows outdated content i.e. the content which is not available or not displayed  in Google search engine
  • Lets you learn which URLs were filtered by SafeSearch adult filter of Google

4. Discover Performance Reports: 

Now, Fresher Discover Data is all time available in Google Search Console performance reports. With this great feature, the site owners can view the most recent data. This data can be even a day old data. For every publisher that considers Google Discover Feed as a source of traffic, the fresher data offers quite precise, timely review of your content performance.

As per the announcement of Google, discover performance report data was introduced within 3 days of the time period. However, it should be noticed that the search analytics API does not support the fresh data feature yet.

5. Google Search Console Coverage Report: 

As per Google’s survey, it has been observed that the Index Coverage Report in Google Search Console is more accurate especially in the case of precise reporting and the report will have a chart notification.

The report will inform you about more indexed pages. This means that if Google has been reporting that the pages are not being indexed and are labelled as ‘crawled’, a few out of those pages were already indexed.

However, the indexed page ratio is a crucial aspect for SEOs as well as publishers that usually check the overall health of a website in Google index. So, this recent update of Google will help you to showcase your website quote strong in Google far more than you expected.

6. Google Search Console Messages are Now Viewable:

The company has recently announced that with this new feature, messages in Google Search Console are now accessible via the bell icon. You can find this icon at the top of any page within the Search Console. However, the updated interface also permits site owners to view their messages.

The owners can view their messages from anywhere inside the tool and that too without leaving any reports. This feature offers better decision making as you can easily refer messages without having to leave the resort that you’re currently viewing.

This way, the information becomes more accessible while enhancing the workflow. However, you can anytime divide the messages and it will be easier to locate communications related to a particular issue.

7. Addition of Product Results Filters To Performance Report:

Google has just now declared that it has added new filters to the performance report within Google Search Console. This feature will let you know how well your product results are performing in search. Google is now able to capture and display click and impression data.

The report: You can get this data under the Performance report by just clicking on ‘search appearance’ followed by clicking on ‘product results’. With this, you will see clicks as well as impressions. Also, it can get divided further according to the queries,  device, and geography.

However, product rich results usually display price, product ratings, and availability along with some descriptive information. Kindly make it a note that produces rich results are not new. They are just the report in Google Search Console.

8. Google Search Console Would Generate Speed Reports

After its research time of over six months, Google has now started to roll out publicly to all Search Console users. Let us see what these reports are.

The “Speed” reports can be easily located under the “Enhancements” section of Google Search Console. It will help webmasters find the sections rapidly along with the URLs of their websites that may have experienced various speed performance issues.

This way, you can start diagnosing and rectifying the issues that are slowing down the speed of page loading times while decreasing the overall site performance. Additionally,  Google will start lining-up your pages as Fast, Moderate, and Slow.

9. Introducing Video Enhancement and Video Appearances Performance Reports

Google has introduced two new reports within Google Search Console namely Video Enhancement, Video Appearances Performance Reports that will help you understand how efficiently your videos are performing in Google search. Also, it will help you fix issues with your videos that are getting shown in Google Search.

The first report talks about a new option under the Performance report, within ‘Search Appearances’. With it, you can only see video-only clicks as well as impressions.

The company is quite excited to share its extended support for videos that will allow you to see the performance of videos in the main search results tab. However, you can also find the performance of videos in ‘Discover’ with the help of the new ‘Videos’ appearance’ option.

10. Change of Address Tool to New Interface:

Google has added the Change of Address tool to the new interface of Google Search Console. The feature was previously available in the old Search Console but it was not moved when the company closed the old interface. Let us talk about what this Change of Address Tool is.

So, this tool is a brilliant option to communicate to Google that your site has moved to a new address. You can use the Change of Address tool whenever you migrate your website from one domain or subdomain to another.

For example, you are moving your website from abc.com to abc.org or abc5.com. So, this tool would inform Google about your change and will also help to migrate your Google Search results from your old site to your new site. Amazing! Isn’t it?

11. Breadcrumb Structure Data Reports:

Google has introduced breadcrumb structured data reports within Google Search Console. Due to this amazing feature, webmasters can now receive notification through email if their sites are having any breadcrumb structured data issue. You can access the report under the Enhancements section from the left-hand navigation panel of the Google Search Console.

Breadcrumb trails let the users know about the position of a page within the hierarchy of the site. If you mark up your pages with the help of breadcrumb structured data, then it will help search engines to display this information to the users. In the rare case, if your breadcrumb trail is unable to display the data as expected then, this new report of Google will surely give you some sort of data to check. It will apparently help you resolve the issue.

In a nutshell, breadcrumbs are just one of multiple structured data elements with which you can flesh out the listings.

12. Datasets to the Enhancement Reports Section

The new report added to Google Search Console can now tell you about the dataset performance. You can find out in the enhancements section under ‘Datasets’. You can access this new feature only if you use Datasets markup on your web pages. So, what are these datasets?

Last year in 2018, Google launched Google Dataset Search which is a search service that lets you find data from government, sciences, and some news companies.

Additionally, Google launched a new policy that permits developers to access this feature in order to markup the web page content. With this, searchers can aptly visualize data displayed on a web page in Google’s search results.

13. Auto- DNS Verification

This is most probably the fastest method to verify websites in the search console of Google. Google has recently declared that site owners can now verify their web sites with Google Search Console in a new way and this new way is auto-DNS verification.

This feature will work with a particular number of DNS providers. Additionally, it can help make the process simpler by getting the website verified within Google Search Console. Google has made collaborations with a number of domain name registrars in order to automate verification flow.

Though, this flow will guide you with all the essential steps required to update the registrar configuration. This way, your DNS record will include the verification token provided that will make the verification process flawless. Let us see how it works.

If you wish to verify your domain using the new flow, then you:

  • Click on  ‘add a property’ from the property selector. You can find it from the drop-down menu on top of the Search Console sidebar.
  • Select the ‘Domain’ option.

The system will inform you through the number of steps that will include a visit to the registrar site. At the registrar site, you can apply the required changes.

14. Performance Report Mails

Google is now sending some monthly reports to verified Google Search Console site owners.  These reports will show how well their sites are performing in Google search. The email report to be displayed here is ‘ Your January month’s performance on Google Search is…’ Isn’t it a perfect report

Overall, the performance report mail sends some monthly reports that include a monthly data summary from your Google Search Console reports. This data summary will include all the data from your performance reports along with the top-performing content pages, impressions, clicks, top countries, average rankings, mobile versus desktop performance, and more.

15. Mobile-First Indexing Features

Google has made some twists to Google Search Console in order to make webmasters and SEOs understand the way Google indexes their sites. With this feature, you can check whether Google has switched a site to mobile-first indexing or not.

Under settings for a property, Google can now show you which Googlebot is indexing the site. In other terms, it will show you whether it is a Googlebot smartphone or Desktop.

However, if it is a Googlebot smartphone, then Google will provide you with the exact date when it switched from desktop to smartphone crawling.