Use a Proxy to Test Development Sites with Google Tools
If Google’s testing tools like the Mobile Friendly Test, won’t work with a disallowed or noindexed locally hosted development site, Google provides a guide to implementing a proxy to bypass any...
View ArticleImpressions from bots and scrapers can sometimes still make their way into GSC
Google filters and blocks bots at different positions in their search systems. It’s still sometimes possible to see impressions from bots and scrapers appearing as impressions in Google Search Console...
View ArticleContinuous scrolling won’t change how impressions are counted in Google...
Google’s new “continuous scroll” feature for its SERPs will continue to load results in sets of 10, so impressions in GSC will continue to be counted in the same way. For example, when a user scrolls...
View ArticleContinuous scrolling will initially only impact the top 40 search results in...
Continuous scrolling in Google search results is being rolled out on mobile English-language results in the US. For now, it will work on the first four pages only (that is the top 40 results). Users...
View ArticleThe system for slowing down crawl rate is more responsive in slowing down...
A site owner was mentioning to John that they saw a drop in crawl rate which was attributed to high response times. They’ve since fixed this, but the crawl rate has not changed. John explained that it...
View ArticleIt’s not uncommon to see differences across schema validation tools
Users may see a difference in schema validation across tools. This is because the schema.org test is designed to validate all theoretical schemas, whereas the reports in Google Search Console and the...
View ArticleTitles shown in SERPs are based on the page and not the user query
The titles shown in search results on Google are based on the page itself and not the search query. If you notice that the title displayed in the SERPs is being changed between older and newer versions...
View ArticleMismatch in number of indexed URLs shown in site:query vs. GSC
One interesting question was why the Google search results of a site:query don’t match what Search Console shows for the same website. John responded that there are slightly different optimizations for...
View ArticlePageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console data have different use cases —...
A user asked about the difference between PageSpeed Insights (PSI) scores and the CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report) data found in Google Search Console (GSC). According to John, ultimately there’s...
View Article“Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt” pages aren’t always an issue
One user asked about having hundreds of pages showing as ‘Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt’ in GSC. This only really becomes a problem if the blocked pages are ranking in place of the content you...
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