Last Updated on May 12, 2022

This training will teach you how to set up Search Console for a client. It consists of 4 parts: Adding the site, linking search console to Google Analytics, adding a sitemap, and fixing crawl errors.

Adding A Site to Search Console

  1. Near the top left corner of the screen there will be a dropdown with the name of the client whose data you are currently looking at.
  2. Click on the dropdown and toward the bottom of the list you can add a new property to Search Console.
  3. Once you push that button, you are given the option to either add a domain or a URL prefix.
    • Domain type will aggregate all variants and all subdomains of a domain into one property but it requires DNS access to verify.
    • URL prefix will verify one variant such as https://www variant.  As long as the website is forcing one variant (preferably an https variant) then the URL prefix should be fine.

Search Console Verification Methods in Order of Preference:

  1. Domain name provider – Always try this method first because we can verify the entire domain. The client will either need to give us access to where the DNS records are managed or we need to provide the client with the TXT record and instructions. We should also have the client verify the domain in their own Search Console account as well while at it.
    • Verify a Domain
      • Copy the HTML provided. Sign into the Sebo GoDaddy account.
      • Click on the drop down in the top right corner (has the silhouette of a person) and select Pro Dashboard.
      • On the left side of the screen, there should be a box that says “Client Activity,” click on “View All.” Find your client. If they aren’t there, ask Jonny for help, we need access to their domain.
      • Inside the box that says “Products” there is a subsection called Domains. Next to their domain on the right, click “Manage.” Roll down to the bottom box that says “Additional Settings” and click “Manage DNS.” Click “Add.” Under Type, select TXT. Under Host, put @. Under TXT value, paste the snippet of HTML that you copied from Search Console. Under TTL, put “60 seconds”. Save. Go try to verify the domain again. It could take anywhere from a few minutes to 24 hours.
  2. Google Tag Manager – If GTM is properly installed on the website and we have access to the GTM account then this method can be used to auto verify a URL Prefix.
  3. Google Analytics – If Analytics is directly installed on the website properly and we have access to it then this method can be used to auto verify a URL Prefix.
  4. HTML Tag – Some sites already have a place in the theme settings or in a plugin for 3rd party scripts where you can paste the HTML tag to verify the URL Prefix this way. In the event none of these seem to exist you could install a plugin such as “Insert Custom CSS and JS in Header & Footer” to add the tag. https://wordpress.org/plugins/skyboot-custom-script/
  5. HTML file – For this method you simply need to place a specific html file in the root directory of the website. Where this gets technical is you either need hosting access to add the file or you use WP File manager plugin to upload the file. If you ever use WP File manager you need to be extra careful not to delete/edit files that shouldn’t be messed with cause you could break the website. You should also immediately delete the plugin once you finish because this plugin has been the because of some major hacking vulnerabilities in the past.

Link with Google Analytics

We want our Google tools to pass as much information as possible to each other so that we can accurately see what is happening on our clients’ websites.

Sitemaps

A sitemap is listing of all the pages on your site. It is designed to tell the search engines what pages on your website are new or updated, and are available for crawling. It helps Google to crawl and index each page on your website.

Crawl Errors

Crawl errors come up when something happens on a web page that inhibits the ability of bots to crawl the website effectively. Most of the time crawl errors refer to broken links. This happens when a link points to a URL that no longer exists. Two negative things happen with broken links. First, you lose the link juice that gets wasted on a non-existent page. Second, the user experience is worse. If someone clicks on a link and come to a broken page, they are very likely to have a negative experience and leave your website. Google wants to send people to websites that will give searchers a good experience, so a lot of crawl errors lead to lower rankings.

There are 2 main ways to fix crawl errors. The best way is to find the pages on your site that link to the non-existent page, then correct the link to point to the right page. If the link to the page comes from other websites, the easiest way to fix these types of crawl errors is with redirects. A redirect will send someone who clicks on a broken link to, instead of the non-existent page, a chosen substitute URL. This URL will get the traffic and the link juice that is sent to the missing page. Setting up redirects is important to both the rankings and the user experience.

Step 1 – Check Search Console for Crawl Errors under “Coverage”, most of the time real errors will show up under the “Errors” and “Valid with warning” tabs. Sometimes there are “Excluded” pages that shouldn’t be excluded, so it is good to check through this section periodically as well just to make sure no important pages are being excluded.

Step 2 – Using the Redirection plugin we are going to either individually redirect the error URLs one at a time or for longer lists you will want to generate a CSV file and bulk upload them.

Step 3 individual option – When doing redirects individually you will grab the relative URL of the broken link and paste it in the “Source URL” field.  Then you will find a page on the website that you want that page to redirect to (when in doubt link to the home page “/“) and paste that relative URL in the “Target URL” field.  Repeat this process for each redirect.

Step 4 bulk option – When doing redirects in bulk you will want to download the CSV report from Search Console.  Take the report and delete all of the columns except the one with the URLs.  Also remove the title row.  You should be left with only one column with just broken URLs.  Now take the second column and start finding URLs on the site you want the broken links to redirect to.  Once the list is complete convert all of the URLs to relative.  You can do a find and replace to remove the “http://domainname.com” part of the URL.  Save the file as a CSV.  Now take the CSV file and upload it to the redirection plugin (Tools -> Redirection -> Options -> Import)

Step 5 – Test a few of the URLs to make sure they are redirecting.  Once you are comfortable that the redirects are working go ahead and mark all of the URLs as fixed in Search Console again.

Step 6 – Return to the “Coverage” section of Search Console, select the page you’ve fixed and then select “Validate Fix”. Google should recrawl the page in the next week and you will see if the error is fixed.  

Repeat the above steps as necessary until no more crawl errors show up.

Examples of Error Typesrrors they have are:
  • Redirect error – look through these and address them.  It probably indicates a redirect loop potentially
  • Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’ – should verify or double check that we don’t want any of these pages to be indexed
  • Server error (5xx) – make sure that these pages are working if they are supposed to
  • Submitted URL seems to be a Soft 404 – the website is showing the page does not exist. In this case we usually set up redirects.
  • Other types – there are other error types but these are the most common

Bulk Redirects