Google refreshes Search Console, Image Search, and Mobile-First Indexation

Search Engine Land reviewed Google NYC meetup that took place January 24, 2019. John Mueller spoke about changes coming to Search Console, image search, and mobile-first indexation.

Image search will become more important for webmasters and SEO experts in 2019. According to Mueller, user behavior is going to change, so Google needs to take that into account to adapt this search tool on time. Now image search serves various purposes, from searching for information or names to online shopping.

As for mobile-first, Mueller ensured that Google is actively moving the remaining websites to the new indexation. Google experts are going to enhance their interactions with webmasters via Search Console to speed up the migration. Google will notify site owners about existing issues.

On January 25, a detailed blog post explaining the upcoming Search Console changes was published on the official Google’s Webmaster Central Blog

So, here’s what’s going to change:

• Crawl Errors API will be removed, as well as sitemap and crawl error reports. All the data from those reports is now imported to a new report; there’s still no alternative for Crawl Errors API.
• Google website scanner will be replaced with a URL inspector. It will have more information about URLs than before: for example, HTTP headings, page resources, JavaScript journal and a page screenshot. Besides, it’ll be possible to submit your web pages for re-indexation pages to speed up adding them to the Google index.
• A new Search Console version will have a user management tool with users, owners, and permissions.
• There will be no structured data reports that Google doesn’t support. Now the new Search Console has four types of rich search results that are available for status reports: recipes, jobs, events, and Q&A. With adding more rich results, there will be new tools and reports.
• HTML suggestions, Property Sets, Android Apps, and Blocked resources will be disabled. The latter will be available via URL inspector and other reports, and Property Sets will be replaced with Domain Properties.

Besides, Google is going to have more meetups with webmasters and Google employees in 2019. What is more, they are going to expand their meetups all over the world, now just Mountain View and New York.

SEO–expert commentary:

«Many SEO experts and webmasters are not ready to give up the older Search Console tools that are not going to be in the new version»:

«That is not to say that the new Search Console dashboard is less informative, but some tools (HTML suggestions, Crawl Errors/API and Blocked resources) will not be there. This data will either be removed from Search Console’s interface, or it will be there in a different form.

After the old Search Console is finally gone, private alternatives will likely appear to replace the deleted Console reports. Google is actively reducing the data from its official analytics webmaster tools. That is especially striking if you look at the principles of data collection in Google Analytics where a part of the information is encrypted by the search itself, so the number of “non-sourced” traffic only increases YoY».

Technologist SEO-expert of the SEO.RU Company

Konstantin Abdullin