Google continuously is changing and innovating everything that they have to offer us. One of these things is their search console reports for companies websites. Google updates and makes changes to the search console often in hopes it make it more helpful and better for their users.
The Old Search Console vs The New Search Console
With the most current google search console a lot of changes have been made to it. For example, the names for the reports have changed from the older console. The next being that you can go back sixteen months to see search traffic data instead of just 3 months, which is what the old console offered. The newer console also gives detailed information about a specific page, including index coverage, canonical URL, mobile usability, and more. It offers tracking flows for specific pages to help you monitor, fix, and request a recrawl of pages affected by crawling issues. The issue report security has also been updated, which will show you a history of other issues that your site has had in the past. No site-wide view of blocked resources is available, but you can see a list of blocked resources for individual URLs using the URL Inspection tool. This may be seen as a negative though. Google is still continuously making changes to the search console reports and it’s very important to stay up to date with that.
So Which Search Console Report Is Better?
According to the google site, they “strongly recommend using the newer version of each report, as it becomes available”. Yet I see positives and negatives with both of these reports. Since there are so many changes and updates with the new console, it may be frustrating to people who are used to using the older console. After looking at the article, “The Differences And The Pro’s And Con’s Of The New Google Search Console” from Acutate Media made some good points on this topic. To sum it up, the new reports seem to have really stepped up their game making it better than the old reports. For example, you can see back 16 months of data, which is extremely beneficial. They also state that “you now have the ability to get a much bigger range of data than you used to.” Acutate does touch on how their mobile experience is a little iffy and could use some fixing. Yet, that comes with any new thing, you have to be able to test it out. Overall the old search console did have some good things working, but google updated and changed it for a reason and it’s obvious that some great things came from it. We will just have to wait and see what google brings to our search console reports next!