URL Inspection Tool Update in Google Search Console — Analyzing the Good and Bad in the Beta Version

Google assured users of coming up with a URL inspection tool when they launched a new Search Console in 2018. The tool helps monitor and optimize a website’s performance. Responding to the request of web administrators, users will now have the ability to see Google Search status of specific links.

What does the URL inspection tool do?

The URL inspection tool gives the user the ability to enter a particular link that they own and fetch details about its crawling, indexing and other related information. This information is retrieved directly from Google index.

How does it benefit the user?

When you enter a URL in the inspection tool, it gives you information about the last crawl date and status. It also informs you of any errors related to indexing and crawling, and if the link is the canonical URL for that specific page. In case of successful indexing, you will receive information and status about any developments found on the page. This includes features like a linked AMP version, rich results like Recipes and/or Jobs.

The Search Console also notes if the URL is on Google or not and gives you more information about its index coverage and AMP status. The tool offers suggestions to improve the results in the enhancements section.

In case the link you input doesn’t appear, the tool will also answer your ‘why’ and give a report of any other pages that are being affected with the same issues. This will help you successfully track down and address bugs. Other information provided by the tool includes information about noindex robots meta tags and canonical URL for the page.

Is there anything else that Google has to offer?

Certainly! In addition to the launch of the aforementioned tool, Google has included a set of additional features and reports for the new Search Console. These include:

• Recipe Report: This feature allows you to address and fix structured issues related to data that affect recipes rich results. With their task-oriented interface, you can test your fixes and validate them while Google will keep you informed on the progress via messaging.
• New Search Appearance Filters: This feature in Search Analytics generates reports with improved visibility about new search appearance results. This also includes Google Play Instant and Web Light results.
• Traffic Data: You can now get up to sixteen months of traffic data using the Search Analytics API that generates it seamlessly like a Performance report.

But how well does the new feature function?

Since we only have a beta version right now, it is still under the rollout phase and isn’t accessible to all users. The tool can be found in the left sidebar under the ‘Sitemaps’ section.

Once you click on the URL inspection tab, a search bar will appear at the top and give you the option to ‘Inspect any URL’ (must be a URL that you own)

What happens next? Well, ‘URL has no enhancements’

While you might expect to see the information about Schema markup on the page entered in the URL inspection tool, the Enhancement section currently deals with structured data, linked AMP pages and more. Let’s resolve the confusion here. Not all structured data types are being supported by this tool in the beta version. The results being supported right now include recipes and job postings.

However, the Enhancements section works when you test an AMP-enabled URL. This shows that Google does acknowledge the AMP-linked page which was valid. You can delve deeper into AMP results under ‘Enhancement’ to get more information about indexing of the AMP version.

Issue: User-declared canonical

A lot of users faced an issue where the ‘user-declared canonical’ field had ‘none’ as the result, even though the pages have been implemented with a ‘rel=canonical’ tag on all website pages. This issue was addressed by Google representatives and they have assured to make this clearer in the coming days.

The manual process isn’t so bad. You’re in for a pleasant surprise

Going through all URLs one-by-one can be a daunting task and end up being pretty time-consuming. So, why not check URLs with existing issues in one go? When you click on the Index Coverage report, you will see a Inspect URL tab. This tool can be a handy feature and you can also check specifically for ‘Excluded’ URLs with a single click.

Identify cases of duplicity with ease

The tool also indicates if the submitted URL is canonical or not. Google can select a canonical URL from a website outside your domain in case of content duplicity. You can then identify if your content has been published on the external website with your consent. Google will choose either of the URLs as canonical where the same content has been published. In case you are curious, you can search for the same on Google and chances are that you will see the copy on top in the SERPs if it is considered canonical by Google.

Therefore, if you receive a result saying ‘not on Google’ for your URL, it is possible that the other copy has been indexed to be in the search results. This feature helps in identifying duplicate copies and you can take required action in case of any unethical copying.

Here is a glitch that needs to be fixed

A small glitch that you can come across is getting a conflicting result when submitting an excluded URL. The tool certainly has some glitch here as it can show ‘URL is on Google’ with the submitted URL being canonical. This is a conflict in the Index Coverage report.

The second conflicting glitch in Index Coverage report

However, you might not get all the information you want just yet. The tool confirms if ‘URL is not on Google’, but can generate a conflicting report that says it was crawled and fetched successfully. The tool also says that indexing is allowed for that URL. This issue needs to be fixed.

The referring page data can be useful to some extent

While you won’t get much when you continue testing the beta version, ‘referring page’ information can be useful to some extent. This feature can point you to the location where the Googlebot has discovered or is possibly discovering the URL on the web. A reference page can be seen as follows:

Another case of usefulness for this tool is when checking for ‘Crawl Anomaly’ URL. Index Coverage report displays the same when ‘an unspecified anomaly happened while the URL was being fetched’. Thus, you might not receive any detailed information directly about the occurrence time of the anomaly. However, the referring page will allow you to evaluate and create a hypothesis for the reason behind the crawl anomaly.

Let’s summarize the ‘Good’ and the ‘Needs Improvement’ part of the newly added feature

The ‘Good’ Part:

• You will be able to confirm the canonicalization when the rel=canonical tag is specified on a different URL. This is a case of Google completely understanding the rel=canonical intentions. It is probably the most valuable function that this tool offers.
• You get the ability to choose the relevant option for the rel=canonical tag
• You get the ‘referring page’ data, which is a smart option and can be used on multiple occasions
• You can access the tool from a quick link that is located in the Index Coverage report and it can be very useful to investigate ‘Excluded’ URLs

The ‘Needs Improvement’ Part:

• The confusing part of the tool is where a ‘user-declared canonical’ field says ‘none’. Either the submitted URL points to another URL with a rel=canonical tag or it was selected randomly by Google
• There were discrepancies when the tool said that ‘submitted URL has no enhancements’. Although, it consisted of structured data. Maybe Google will add a support function for such cases
• Irregularities between the URL Inspection Tool report, Index coverage report and pages in SERPs. Conflicting reports were generated by the tool where URL Inspection tool showed the URL as indexed while it was specified as ‘not on Google’ in SERPs.
• The tool fails to identify the reason behind the lack of indexing in multiple cases. During some manual tests for URLs that were ‘Crawled — Not Currently Indexed’ the tool gave a conflicting response by showing that it was crawled and fetched without any explanation about the indexing part

Takeaway: URL Inspection Tool is not what it was promised to be (not yet) but it can be occasionally useful.

It is a good initiative on Google’s part trying to provide webmasters with detailed information about the indexing specific URLs. Although it is not completely refined yet, we can certainly hope that things improve in the near future.

This is just the beta version of the Search Console and the imperfections will be taken care of with time. Kudos to Google for making the effort to help users by giving them more information about SEO. Let’s hope that the usefulness and accuracy increase and the tool can deliver on all the promises made.