Google will now more accurately report Indexed Pages in Search Console following the rollout of an update earlier this week (15th December).
On its Twitter page, Google said that pages that were previously tagged as being only crawled and not indexed will now show as indexed and that a chart notification will be viewable in the Index Coverage report.
Google added: “As a result, you may see a transfer of pages from Excluded to Valid state. This does not reflect any changes in your site, but a more accurate accounting system.”
Index Coverage reports generated from last weekend onwards will now see up-to-date and relevant data.
However, in a separate issue, Google also revealed that data anomalies may show up in Search Console for certain periods of December after it discovered a bug in its system last week.
Marketers keeping track of SEO and content campaigns will be mining data from Search Console this month, but it may not be completely accurate due to the “internal issue”, which could have an impact on Performance reports.
Google says that the issues cropped up between 8th and 13th December and that while the issue has now been fixed, reporting of impressions and clicks in Google Discover could be inaccurate.
With new updates and changes, Google Search Console will continue to be a useful tool for webmasters and marketers in 2020, especially as it can be used to rank pages based on relevance, track metrics, assess overall performance, and increase traffic to webpages.
