Google has confirmed that Google plans to close down, discontinue, not port, every single feature from the old Search Console to the new Search Console, stating that they are working on making link reports more consistent and urging people to take steps to ensure that Google can easily determine that their links have been moved over.
Full details are available in the video announcement from Google’s John Mueller here: https://bit.ly/2UICpER
Our resident Senior Account Manager Vincent Masih has incredibly keen to comment on this saying, “My thoughts on this are that this is a big move from Google (IF this is going to definitely happen, they still seem unsure) For years one of the main features of Google Search Console (GSC) aka Google Webmaster Tools, was the crawl errors. You can find any urls that are coming up as 404 code errors, urls that are blocked, server 500 errors etc….granted, if you have a lot of url issues then this is the place to find them.
A report out in 2016 suggested that at that time Google had 2.5 million servers in their data centres which is growing year on year, so think of how much data they must go through per second and the resources needed for that……which brings me onto my next thought…..could this be a way for Google to save on resources and reduce their spend? My thinking behind this is that it is known that Google assigns a certain amount of “Crawl Budget” per website and this crawl budget can be wasted on 404s that are being crawled….hence why we here at RS Digital Marketing like to get these manually checked, mapped to relevant urls and then 301 redirected. When I do my checks in GSC I come across websites that only have a few 404s, some that have hundreds and then some that have thousands!….and it is these that have hundreds and thousands that take up the most time to deal with. So if Google is running it’s crawlers through websites on the net and is also crawling billions of 404 pages, then this most definitely must be impacting their resources both technically and financially…which leads me ask, could this be the real reason they are thinking of doing away with crawl errors? Time will tell.”
RS Digital Marketing – Here to Help
Here at RS Digital Marketing we have been fully immersed in the digital marketing industry for over 15 years, and constantly stay up-to-date with Google’s changes and updates so that we can adhere to them completely and in turn achieve the best digital marketing results for all of our clients. If anyone has any questions regarding this update or any other Google updates our professional and friendly team and only a phone call away and happy to help. Do not hesitate to get in touch.
