{"id":12487,"date":"2019-04-16T09:00:10","date_gmt":"2019-04-16T06:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/?p=12487"},"modified":"2021-06-22T18:17:10","modified_gmt":"2021-06-22T15:17:10","slug":"fix-errors-google-search-console","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/fix-errors-google-search-console\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Find and Fix Indexing Errors Using Google Search Console"},"content":{"rendered":"
In this post you will learn how to use the Google search console to identify and fix indexing errors.<\/p>\n
This is a very important step in the whole SEO process because if there are crawling or indexing problems, Google will not index your website correctly and this can negatively affect your rankings.<\/p>\n
The two tools to use available in the Google Search Console are:<\/p>\n
The Index coverage report<\/em> and the<\/p>\n URL inspection tool<\/em>.<\/p>\n To get access to the tools, the first step is to add and verify<\/strong><\/a> your website with the Google Search Console.<\/p>\n If you have already done this, then you can proceed with the next steps.<\/p>\n This post will cover the following topics:<\/strong><\/p>\n The index coverage report is available in the Google Search Console and shows you which of your pages have been successfully indexed by Google and which pages have not been indexed because of an error.<\/p>\n For each of the pages, you can get more details about the error and you have the option to request Google to re-index your web pages or website as a whole.<\/p>\n The index coverage report has replaced the \u2018Crawl Errors\u2019 report previously available in Google Webmaster Tools.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Login to Google Search Console and select your primary domain from the dropdown list (top left corner).<\/p>\n Click COVERAGE under Index to view the Index Coverage Report<\/em><\/p>\n You will notice that the top part of the report has 4 tabs:<\/p>\n Since our goal is to investigate any indexing errors, we will use the ERROR tab.<\/p>\n The troubleshooting process has two parts:<\/p>\n Make sure that only the ERROR tab is highlighted and scroll down to the DETAILS section.<\/p>\n You will notice that errors are grouped into categories. The possible values are:<\/p>\n For each error category, you can see the Validation status, trend and the number of affected pages.<\/p>\n You can click on any row to see more details about the affected pages.<\/p>\n Now that you have learned how to find any errors, let\u2019s see how to fix them.<\/p>\n As mentioned above, errors are grouped into 8 categories and depending on the type of error, we can follow a different path to fix it.<\/p>\n A crawl issue means that a page has problems and Google cannot index it. You need to find out what exactly is the issue, fix it and resubmit the page to Google.<\/p>\n One of the most common reasons why a page might have crawl issues is that some of the page resources (images, CSS, JavaScript) could not be loaded when Google tried to index the page.<\/p>\n Before investigating further, you should:<\/p>\n Go back to the Index Coverage Report and to the page that has issues and click the VALIDATE FIX button.<\/p>\n Google will notify you via email about the results of your indexing request.<\/p>\n If you still get errors or resources not found after clicking the TEST LIVE URL button, you should first fix the errors by changing your HTML Code and then request indexing and validating the fix.<\/p>\n These kinds of errors are easy to fix. What it means is that a page could be found by the Google bot at the time of indexing.<\/p>\n In most cases, this can be a false alarm. So, the first thing to do is to check that the page is correctly not found.<\/p>\n Click on a page from the list and then the INSPECT URL button.<\/p>\n While waiting to get the data from Google Index, open a new browser window and type the URL.<\/p>\n If the page is found on your website and you want to add it to the Google Index then:<\/p>\n If this is a page that indeed returns a 404 code and you don\u2019t want Google to index it, you have two options:<\/p>\n First, to leave it as it is. Google will gradually remove the page from the index. This is normal and expected to happen for pages that are no longer valid or deleted for a valid reason.<\/p>\n Second, to redirect the page using a 301 redirection to a related page on your website.<\/p>\n Pages listed here could not be accessed by the Google bot either because the server was down or not available at the moment.<\/p>\n Normally you should not have any Server Errors reported. If you have a LOT of errors, then this means that your server has issues and you should investigate more to find out why.<\/p>\n If you have a few errors, then most probably the page could not be accessed temporarily and this means that you can request from Google to re-index the page.<\/p>\n Follow this process:<\/p>\n Click on one of the affected pages and you will get a menu with options on the right.<\/p>\n First, click on INSPECT URL. Google will give you more details about the errors from the Google Index.<\/p>\n Url is not on Google: indexing errors<\/strong><\/p>\n If you get the message “url is not on google: indexing errors<\/strong>” it means that Google has either removed the URL from their index because they could not access it or it’s not in their index because when they first tried to crawl it was not available.<\/p>\n Follow these steps:<\/p>\n Open a new browser window and navigate to the URL. If it loads ok then go back to GSC and click the TEST LIVE URL button.<\/p>\n Google will re-fetch the page and give your more details. If it was a temporary error, you can click the REQUEST INDEXING button to re-submit the page to Google<\/p>\n If the page does not load in the browser, you need find out what the problem is and then revisit GSC, click the TEST LIVE ULR and then REQUEST INDEXING.<\/p>\n If you cannot solve the error then consider adding a “noindex” header tag to the page and remove it from your sitemap. This will instruct Google to stop accessing the page and to stop reporting any errors related to this page.<\/p>\n When you get a \u2018redirect error\u2019, it means that the page could not be accessed by the Google bot because it redirects to a page that doesn\u2019t exists or not working.<\/p>\n The procedure for fixing redirect errors is the same as before.<\/p>\n\n
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What is the Index Coverage report?<\/h2>\n
How to Find Errors with the Index Coverage Report<\/h2>\n
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How to Fix Index Coverage Report Errors<\/h2>\n
How to Fix \u201cSubmitted URL has crawl issue\u201d Errors<\/h3>\n
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How to Fix \u201cSubmitted URL not found (404)\u201d errors<\/h3>\n
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How to Fix Server Error (5xx)<\/h3>\n
How to Fix Redirect Errors<\/h3>\n