Google Search Console

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The Google Search Console is a service provided by Google to manage your domains' and websites' indexing and search presence.

When you open the search console by going to https://search.google.com/u/1/search-console/i search and logging in, you may need to register your ownership of your sites or domains through adding DNS entries or site metatags.

For most purposes, including checking Google's indexing, it is recommended you register your domain as a "domain" property rather than registering your website URL as a website "url prefix" property. The difference is discussed on Google's Webmaster support site. You may register both domain and site properties for the same website without penalty.

Checking indexing coverage

Once your domain property (or site url prefix property) is registered, you can go to Indexing > Pages to see functions related to indexing for Google Search, including a day-by-day graph of how many pages in your site are registered. Hovering your mouse over any daily vertical bar in this graph gives detailed figures for that date.

Screenshot of Google Search Console Indexing > Pages display
Screenshot of Google Search Console Indexing > Pages display

In the screenshot at right, you can see an example of such a graph. In this case, we can see that on September 26, this particular website had 127 pages indexed by Google, with another 473 pages that Google was aware of the existence of but were not indexed. Further, we can see that about am month later, Google abruptly began deindexing the poor, unfortunate developer's website, leading to a total of 2 pages indexed and 560 known pages unindexed.

Below the chart is a list of reasons that pages are currently not indexed with information about each reason. Users can click "View data about indexed pages" or one of the non-indexing reasons to drill down for greater detail or to mark issues as "fixed" and request re-evaluation for indexing.

As a practical point, it should be noted that the reason "Crawled - Currently not indexed", as we see reported for 358 pages in this example screenshot, typically means that Google is aware of a page and is declining to state a reason why it is not indexed, and clicking through "Crawled - Currently not indexed" to mark it fixed or request another indexing attempt typically will just report "failed" in several days, leaving poor sods such as the developer whose website is under consideration in this image no recourse except to scratch their heads and rage impotently at the unjust whims of an uncaring and impersonal web search colossus.

See Also