Class 7 - Google Search Console Part 4 |
FREE Advanced SEO Course
Watch the Full Video : Google Search Console Part 4
Sitemap
What is a sitemap? It is the map of a website. Right? It shows how many URLs are on the website and where they are. That is what a map does it shows what is there, where it is, and how much of it there is. A sitemap is simply a long list of all the URLs on a website.
Four Types of Sitemap
1) HTML Sitemap:
This is a single webpage that contains many links. It is not useful for our purpose because it is a normal HTML page, and Google can index it.
2) XML Sitemap (For SEOs):
A sitemap is the website’s roadmap for search engines. It tells search engines which pages exist, which pages are important, when they were last updated, and which pages should be crawled. It helps with faster indexing, is useful for new websites, helps discover deep pages, and provides update signals to search engines.
3) RSS and ATOM Sitemap:
Unlike a full sitemap, these feeds usually include recent content only, helping platforms quickly discover fresh pages and recrawl them faster. In short, they’re useful for fast indexing, content distribution, and keeping subscribers or bots updated automatically whenever you publish something new. Google also supports RSS feeds. RSS URLs, and on some platforms, Atom URLs, can be used by Google instead of a sitemap. You can also submit these URLs in Google Search Console. Google uses the URLs contained in these feeds and treats them the same way as an XML sitemap.
4) Text Sitemap:
I open a normal Notepad. In this notepad, I start adding the URLs. For example:
https://mitromate.com
https://mitromate.com/contact-us
https://mitromate.com/about-us
Add all your URLs, one URL per line, into a normal text file. Then save the file, for example, as my-sitemap.txt. After that, upload it to your website’s hosting. Then submit it in Google Search Console. Your work is done. It is very simple. There is no need to create an XML file or any other special format.
These are the three different formats that Google currently supports. If someone asks whether a sitemap can be in a format other than XML, the answer is yes. It can also be an RSS feed, an Atom feed, or a text file.
Sitemap Rules
- One sitemap can contain up to 50,000 URLs only.
- The file size should not be more than 15 MB.
Google does not support the priority tag. It is only added by some online sitemap generators.
Google uses the lastmod tag. With this tag, you can tell Google when your page was last updated.
Sitemap Index: It contains the URLs of the sitemaps.
Sitemap: It contains a list of URLs.
Removals
So, why do we need the Removal Tool? Let’s say there was a disgruntled employee in your company who created a random page on your website that is harmful and should not be there, and Google indexed it. Now, you remove that page from your website and do everything you can, but the content still keeps appearing in Google Search. Scenarios like this can happen. Google Search does not provide any live support where you can delete a page from your website and have Google remove it from the index immediately. In such scenarios, the removal tool helps us remove a particular page from the Google index immediately. How immediate is it? If you enter a particular URL in the Removal Tool, it is usually removed from Google Search within 2-3 hours.
But one thing is important to keep in mind. This is a temporary removal. If you remove a URL from the Google Search Index using the Removal Tool, it is removed only for 6 months, not permanently. So, does that mean the page can come back after 6 months? Yes, it can, if you have not deleted it from your website.
So, if you want to remove a page completely from Google Search, you first have to delete that page from your website. When someone visits that URL, it should return a 404 status code. For example, if I go to google.com/abracadabra, it returns a 404 page. In the same way, the URL that you want to remove using the Removal Tool should return a 404 status code.
- Temporary Removals: It will keep the URL out of Google Search, meaning out of the index, for 6 months.
- Outdated Content: If a user goes to Google Search and submits feedback or a complaint that a particular page on mitromate.com contains outdated content, Google will show you those pages under the Outdated Content tab. Here, you can see which URL it is, what type of request it is, and what its status is. However, for most websites, Google rarely receives this kind of feedback. You may never see a single entry here throughout your career. But whenever you get access to a website or a property for the first time, you should check it once.
- SafeSearch Filtering: If Google removes a URL from SafeSearch because your content is not family-friendly, you will find that information here.
Experience: It means how your users experience your website.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are Google’s way of measuring a website’s performance.
In Core Web Vitals, you can see two parts: mobile and desktop. This shows, out of all the URLs on your website, how many URLs are good, meaning they are fast, how many URLs need improvement, meaning they are not bad and not failing, but they are not good either, and how many URLs are failing completely. The same information is shown separately for both mobile and desktop.
Field Data: When real users visit your website, this shows what their experience is like.
Lab Data: It means the Core Web Vitals data is collected using our device, such as our laptop, and its performance.
The Core Web Vitals data shown in Google Search Console comes from field data, not lab data. Only pages that have enough traffic will have their data shown in Core Web Vitals. The rest of the pages will not appear.
Google crawls and indexes your website’s URLs using the Mobile Bot, so it is important for your website to be optimized for mobile.
HTTPS: If there are any issues related to our website’s SSL certificate, they will be shown here.
Security and Manual Action:
If Google gives your website or any URL a penalty, penalizes it, gives it a punishment, or deindexes it, the details will be shown here.
- Manual Actions: Here, Google will tell you which URL, which part, or which section of your website has been deindexed, penalized, or given a punishment, and it will also show you the reason why.
- Security Issues: If your website is attacked by malware, and Google thinks there is a virus on your website that could affect users, you will see a warning here.
Crawl State
In the Crawl Stats report, you can see how many times Google is crawling your website, what the speed is, what problems it has to face, and what it is consuming.
Robots.txt: With robots.txt, you can control your crawling, not indexing.
Average Response Time (ms): 100 to 500 is fine. If it is more than that, you need to upgrade your hosting plan. If it is 1,000+, you need to upgrade your hosting.
Host Status: It means all the subdomains or URL prefix properties under the domain are called hosts.
Change Address: It means that when you move your website from one domain to another, you can use this option to inform Google that your website is moving from one domain to another. Please transfer our traffic from here to there.
NOTE: When you give someone access to your Google Search Console and later remove them, you should also delete their ownership token. Otherwise, they can reconnect and misuse your website’s data.