Google updates the Search Console coverage report

The updated report now gives you very specific categories and labels for errors and responses.

What is the coverage report. The coverage report can be found in Google Search Console, and it shows the indexing state of all URLs that Google has visited, or tried to visit, in your property.

What changed. Google said it added more fine-grained index coverage statuses to the report. You can expect Google to relabel some categories with the new, more specific categories. Google wrote the list of changes include:

  • Removal of the generic “crawl anomaly” issue type – all crawls errors should now be mapped to an issue with a finer resolution.
  • Pages that were submitted but blocked by robots.txt and got indexed are now reported as “indexed but blocked” (warning) instead of “submitted but blocked” (error)
  • Addition of a new issue: “indexed without content” (warning)
  • Soft 404 reporting is now more accurate

Why we care. With these changes, you can now dive deeper into issues around Google crawling and indexing your web site. The super generic “crawl anomaly” issue has been replaced with very specific issues, so now you know why Google is having issues crawling a specific page.