Google Search Console Introducing REGEX Filter and Revamped Comparison Mode

Google Search Console launching two new features including regular expression (regex) filters and a revamped comparison mode that will help to improve the efficiency of analyzing data in the performance reports.

Now, webmasters and site owners can use Search Console to filter data by regular expression (regex), as well as utilize a revamped comparison mode that supports more than one metric. 

Find out more about these new features and how they can assist with data analysis in the Search Console Performance Reports.

REGEX Filters

Search Console Performance Reports now support REGEX (regular expressions) filters for page URLs and user queries. This will help you create the more complex query and page-based filters and answer more questions that interest them. Google explains how the addition of regex support allows site owners to capture more query data:

“For instance, let’s say your company is called ‘cats and dogs’ but is sometimes also abbreviated as ‘cats & dogs’ or even ‘c&d’. You can use a regex filter to capture all of your branded queries by defining the regex filter: cats and dogs|cats & dogs|c&d.”

To use the new regex filter, create a query or page filter, select the dropdown menu, and select Custom. For further assistance with creating regex filters, visit the help center page.

Previously, Search Console didn’t support more complex cases, such as a query containing one out of a few optional strings. But now, users could filter queries and page URLs according to three patterns: containing a string, not containing a string, and exactly matching a string.

Revamped Comparison Mode

Site owners use the comparison mode in Search Console to answer comparison-based questions. Until now, the table wouldn’t contain a comparison column with a relative difference in percentage if more than one metric was selected.

The revamped comparison mode now supports cases where more than one metric is selected. An improvement to the interface nearly doubles the area available for the data table, making it easier to view results side-by-side.

While comparison mode now allows more than one metric to be compared, only one filter at a time can be applied to those metrics. In addition, the comparison mode now supports the new regex filter for queries and pages.

These updates to Search Console are now available to all site owners.

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Associate Your Site With Google To Unlock More Functionality

Today, Google announced that Search Console has an enhanced Association Page which you see within the settings menu. This New Association Page is created to build a connection between a Search Console property, and some other entity or property in another Google service: for example, between a Search Console property and a Google Analytics account, a YouTube channel, or a Chrome Web Store account.

If you want to associate your Search Console property with another Google service then you need to connect with Google’s New Association Page to unlock more functionality for your site.

Google Association Page Supports Following Property Types:

• Google Analytics Property: You can view your Search Console data, such as organic search queries, in your Google Analytics property. Starting today, you can also link Search Console domain properties to Google Analytics and get better coverage of your organic search results. We recommend using this option as it can help you get a more complete picture in the Search Console reports in Google Analytics.
  Google Ads Account: View the paid and organic report in Google Ads.
• YouTube Channel: Link your videos to your associated website.
• Play Console App: Use App Indexing.
• Actions Console Project: Verify your brand and enable cross-platform functionality.
• Chrome Web Store Account: Publish apps and extensions to the Chrome Web Store on behalf of your site.

For questions or comments on the new Associations page, you can visit Search Central help forums and share your experiences.

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A New Product Performance Report in the Google Search Console

People visits Google to find, search and select that which product or brand is reliable to purchase. So Google announced that they are adding a new data reporting structure for products rich results in the search console. This will help shopper to get product information like descriptions, price and availability within the search results.

For SEOs and Webmasters, they can see data in the Search Console performance report, where you can view the stats such as total clicks, impressions, average click-through rate, and average position. Furthermore, these metrics will be segmented by device, geography and queries.

Those websites that are qualified to appear in Google’s product search results will find a new Search Appearance type called “Product results.” It will be easy to segment your traffic to analyze your search performance.

The new ‘Product results’ search appearance will help website owners understand their search performance for product rich results. For example how shopping traffic changes over time and which search queries product results show up for. You can drill down the data even further to figure out how much traffic comes specifically from rich data like price, availability, etc. If you have any questions on this (or other) Search Console reports, let Google know through the forum or on Twitter.

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A Sneak Preview of Google Search Console New Speed Report Beta

At Google I/O 2019, they demonstrated a new report in the Google Search Console named as ‘Speed Report’. It is currently in beta or experimental mode but they showed some screen shots of it in action. Here are few screenshots from some folks on Twitter:

Google tested a new report in the Search Console, called Speed Report which is currently in beta or experimental mode. But Google presented some screen shots of this upcoming feature. Few of them have shared on twitter. Kenichi Suzuki, Product Expert at Google, shared that Speed Report on mobile:

If you want to sign up this new Search Console Speed Report click here. This new report is powered by CrUX data, that gives you combined overview  of your website’s field metrics where you can dig down into specific issues and see specific examples. Dominik Schwarz also shared on Twitter some more screenshots and slides from the presentation at Google I/O 2019:

Ilya Grigorik, is a web performance engineer at Google, said in his tweet:

• Firebase launches (free) real user performance monitoring for the web.
• Search Console announced new Speed Report, powered by CrUX data.
• Performance budget (Light Wallet) support coming to Lighthouse.

See more details at at Twitter.

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Google Search Console Monitoring Overall Structured Data Performance

Google announced at Webmaster Central Blog, that they have added three new reports in search console. They added unparsable structured data report and two enhancement reports including sitelinks searchbox and logo. Google introduced these new features in search console that will help webmasters and developers to  implement and diagnose structured data.

Unparsable Structured Data Report

Unparsable structured data is a new report that aggregates structured data syntax errors that prevented Google from identifying the feature type. Google said “that is the reason these issues are aggregated here instead of the intended specific feature report.” You can use this report to see if Google was unable to parse any of the structured data you tried to add to your site.

The report helps you with the following actions:

• Review the trends of errors, warnings and valid items: To view each status issue separately, click the colored boxes above the bar chart.
• Review warnings and errors per page: To see examples of pages which are currently affected by the issues, click a specific row below the bar chart.

Here is a screen shot:

You can check this report to see if Google was unable to parse any of the structured data you tried to add to your site. Below is a screenshot showing how the Unparsable Structured Data report looks like.

Logo & Sitelinks Searchbox Enhancements Report

This report is available under the enhancements section in Search Console, if you use the Logo markup or Sitelinks Searchbox. Here is the screenshot where you can find it:

You can read more about the reports in the Search Console Help Center.

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Is Google Search Console Lost Data Affect Your Website Indexing?

Previously I mentioned about Google Search Console Indexing Bug, which was confirmed in a tweet by Google and said that de-indexing issue should be resolved very soon. It means that the data was completely lost from April 9 to April 25^th, accept the performance report.

Here I like to share screenshot of data coverage report to visualize it:

You might be seen a huge up and down due to Google Search Console Lost Data, which could affect your indexing report. For example, if the data aggregation methods is change or there is a logging error, you might see a drop or bump in your chart. This page records known issues that might affect your data.

Google Search Console Lost Data:

April 9-25, 2019

Search Console experienced a data outage that ceased on April 26. The outage affected all reports except the Performance report. All missing data from April 9-25 was replaced with the data from April 26, when data began to be available again.

April 5, 2019

Because of internal management of our Search index, some pages of your websites might have been dropped from our index for a period of a few days without any action on your part. The matter has been resolved, no further action from your side is needed.

April 3, 2019

For most enhancement reports, data is now being collected from more pages than previously reported. Because of this, you might see an increase in issues and affected items/pages on these reports.

According to Google Webmaster:

The issue with missing fresh data in the indexing reports in Search Console has been resolved. The only report that still needs some time to update is the backlinks report. Thanks for your patience!

So it means that 16 days of data is completely gone for all report except Performance report. Now it is not possible to see how Google Search Console Lost Data can badly effect your website due to indexing bug from April 5 to April 25, 2019.

I want to say that keep mind do not add the stats from April 5 to 25, when making or preparing reports for your clients. This is newly added bug come with manual actions in the Google Search Console which was recently started yesterday in the afternoon.  See more details at Twitter.

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Google Search Console Indexing Bug

Google Search Console is still working on the de-indexing issue which was reported on last week. Due to this indexing bug, enhancement and coverage reports, as well as the URL Inspection tool, still impacted according to Google. It seems like this Search Console Indexing Bug is spreading like a virus to other parts of Google.

Google confirmed in a tweet that they are working on it, if you discover a URL is not included, so you can also use the URL Inspector tool to resubmit that page. As you can see, in the reply I said that Old Search Console was better than this new one.

Many SEOs and site owners noticed their index coverage and enhancement reports have not been updated in the Search Console. Last weekend, I saw huge drops in my client’s website indexed pages in the coverage report.

Here is a screen shot:

According to Google, they are recovering on this Search Console Indexing Bug issue but no time frame because it is taking a lot of time. It means that index coverage and enhancement reports were not updated recently and URL Inspector might not reflect live status. Google said that “they will officially update us when it will resolve, if you need to check the status of a URL in the Google index, use the site: command”.

If you find the pages are still missing from Google’s index after used ‘site search’ command, then it is possible the issue is specifically to your site. You can submit that site-specific issues by submitting a thread to Google’s webmaster community message board.

Google Search Console Indexing Bug Quick Review:

Here’s a quick review on what has happened and what is going on with the Google’s Search Console indexing bug:

• On April 4, SEOs and site owners started reporting that a huge amount of their site’s pages were missing from Google’s index.
• On April 6, Google’s John Mueller confirmed there’s a technical issue affecting the search index which will be resolved.
• Google posted updates on Twitter in the last week and keep everyone informed as to what was going on.
• On April 10, Google tweet that the issue was resolved in search results.

But last day, April 15, Google confirmed that the Search Console reports and tools are having issues. I think after indexing bug issue resolved, it should be the biggest Google indexing problem of 2019.

Forum discussion on Twitter and WebmasterWorld.

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