If you haven’t used the Search Console Index Coverage report before, it’s a good time to think again.

This is an invaluable tool for understanding:

1. Which URLs Google crawled and indexed and which ones didn’t.
2. And, more importantly, why the browser made that particular choice for a particular URL.

Index Coverage report

The Index Coverage report details the indexing status of all URLs that GoogleBot visited or attempted to visit on a specific site that was set up in the Google Search Console . Summary pages show results for all URLs for each site added to the Console. Pages are nicely grouped by errors, warnings or valid statuses. It also provides a reason for that particular status, which is especially useful in the case of a 404 error.

Google Search Console ‘s Index Coverage report gets 4 updates so that site owners are better informed about possible indexing problems. The Index Coverage report is relatively new compared to the other reports Google offers, as it was first introduced when the revamped version of Search Console launched in 2018.

Since the launch of the index coverage report, website owners have been giving Google feedback on improvements they would like to see made in the future.

About the changes made from Google they say:

“Based on feedback we received from the community, today we are introducing significant improvements to this report so that you can be better informed about issues that may prevent Google from crawling and indexing your pages. The change is focused on providing a more accurate state of existing issues, which should help you solve them more easily.”

What are those 4 newspapers?

• Removal of generic “crawl anomaly” error reporting – all crawl errors should now be flagged with a clear reason
• Pages submitted for indexing and indexed but blocked by robots.txt are now reported as ” indexed but blocked ” ( warning ) instead of the previous ” submitted but blocked ” ( error )
• Adding a new item indexed without content ( warning )
• Soft 404 error reporting is now more accurate

No more guesswork when it comes to crawling errors, because the ” crawl anomaly ” problem is replaced with precisely indicated problems and solutions. Also the pages that are blocked by the robots.txt file will be clearly indicated. It is also important to add a new item to report an indexed page without content. This means that the URL is in Google ‘s index, but its web crawlers cannot see the content. This can happen for two reasons. Either you posted a blank page by accident (Oh yes that happens too) or Google is unable to read the content of the page due to some error. The last item is improved Soft 404 error reporting. Soft 404 errors are different from regular 404 errors and can be harmful to your site. It is important to fix them so that the site can perform well from an SEO perspective.

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Source: Google