Google Search Console is a valuable tool for SEOs, but it has numerous flaws and limitations that can lead to confusion, frustration, and inaccurate data.
One major issue is incorrect status codes, where GSC reports 410 errors as 404s, making it difficult for SEOs to distinguish between intentional and accidental errors.
Additionally, GSC’s page indexing reports can be inconsistent, with URLs reported as not indexed appearing as indexed in the URL Inspection tool.
URL Inspection itself can be confusing, with contradictions between crawl stats and live tests, and a lack of clarity on redirects.
Managing access and restrictions in GSC is an administrative nightmare, requiring manual changes for each property and user.
Data delays of several days to weeks in various reports hinder timely analysis and troubleshooting.
SEOs often need to resort to writing complex regular expressions to filter data, as GSC’s built-in options are limited.
Google has deprecated several helpful tools, such as the Structured Data Testing Tool and the URL Parameter Tool, leaving SEOs with fewer resources.
Error notifications in GSC are cryptic, lacking sufficient detail to prioritize issues effectively.
Validation of fixes can take weeks, with no clear indication of progress or success.
Crawl stats are limited to 90 days of data retention, insufficient exports, and root-level data only, making in-depth analysis challenging.
Performance numbers in GSC do not align with other analytics tools due to sampling, tracking differences, and hidden queries.
To overcome these limitations, SEOs should build an infrastructure that complements GSC, using third-party tools for monitoring, rendering, and site health checks.
While GSC remains a valuable free resource, it should not be relied upon as the sole source of truth.
SEOs must be aware of its flaws and use a combination of tools and techniques to gain a comprehensive understanding of their websites’ performance in search.
These foibles are so interesting.
Mark did some similar research a few years ago and found these were separate things:
— GSC status — A direct URL search in Google — A keyword search in Google — A search using operator
All different systems, not in sync.
