New GSC Out of Beta

[Sally Stitts]

So, I tried the new Google Search Control panel, which is now "out of beta".

My BIGGEST ISSUE is still there, but worse.
Under "Coverage" - "Search Anomoly" - Today, I got 58 "Affected Pages".
These are NON-EXISTANT, malformed links, created by idiots. They are CLEARLY NOT VALID URLs!
Why must I be the traffic cop for EVERYBODY ELSE IN THE WORLD?
Google is capable of recognizing the invalidity, and yet insists and persists upon drowning us with them. WHY?

In the OLD version, I had to dismiss them TWICE EVERY DAY (due to Google brilliance) (from 5 to 40 per day).
In the new version, I CANNOT find a way to dismiss them.
One would think that Google shows them to you, so you can be aware to them, and make them go away.
Hey Googs, THEY ARE ALL CR@P! I have told you hundreds of times.
Why do you insist upon throwing these things at me, when BOTH you and I know that they are spurious JUNK?
Answer me that.
This is some WAY-BOGUS, WHEEL-SPINNING BS.
.

[engine]

For the record, here's the information about the Search Console coming out of beta.

[webmasters.googleblog.com...]

According to Google, the new console will give you active manual actions and security issues shown directly on the Overview page.


For debugging, the URL inspection tool will also give you the ability to run the tool on the live version of the page.

[lucy24]

Calm down, Sally,* you don’t have to dismiss anything. Like so many annoyances in this world, ignore them and they will go away. (I also like to ignore their ongoing complaints about “indexed but not crawled” because tough patootie, search engine, it’s my site and I decide who crawls where.)


* I was once told your real name but I promptly forgot.

[aristotle]

The real annoyance about these malformed backlinks is that you lose out on a potential good backlink. People tried to link to your site, but they messed up, and so your site doesn't get some backlinks that it should have gotten.

[keyplyr]

The real annoyance about these malformed backlinks is that you lose out on a potential good backlink. People tried to link to your site, but they messed up, and so your site doesn't get some backlinks that it should have gotten.

OK, but I don't see how that is related to the GSC or even Google.

Either a link works or it doesn't. It's not Google's responsibility to fix broken links. They tell us about them. That's about all they can do.

[lucy24]

I don't see how that is related to the GSC or even Google

I don't think it was meant to be. He's talking about the reality behind the report, in those comparatively rare cases where there really is a malformed link at the heart of it all. Few humans are savvy enough to look at their address bar and figure out that the link would probably work fine if, for example, you manually delete the punctuation that sneaked in after the “.html”.

Come to think of it, there is a Google connection, because they expended part of their crawl budget in pursuing a bogus URL. That’s one “real” page that could have been crawled instead--precisely because they're not able to translate a bad URL into a good one.

[keyplyr]

Anyone know where the robots.txt tester went?

[Leosghost]

This one ?

[freetools.webmasterworld.com...]

[keyplyr]

Thanks Leosghost, but no. We're discussing the new GSC are we not :)

The GSC robots.txt tester is a great tool to see how Googlebot reads a site's robots.txt & what warnings or errors may be present.

[not2easy]

I noticed a feedback option last time I ended up in that bat cave. After wasting 10 minutes trying to figure out both what I was supposed to "do" there and where/how to do whatever, I was not in the mood to spend more time on feedback. The people who created it think it is awesome, I'm sure. I find it to be the most obtuse interface I've ever seen and can see no reason to go there voluntarily.

[Robert Charlton]

...After wasting 10 minutes trying to figure out both what I was supposed to "do" there and where/how to do whatever, I was not in the mood to spend more time on feedback. The people who created it think it is awesome, I'm sure. I find it to be the most obtuse interface I've ever seen and can see no reason to go there voluntarily.

Excellent description of Google's approach to interfaces in general. I'm still trying figure out some basic usability issues in Google Maps, and Gmail, or Feedback issues in the serps page, that go back years.

That said, it's unfortunate that Google inherited the word "error", and that when Google reports an "error" or an "anomaly", people get hysterical about it. I would love to see Google hire a really good tech writer to craft a concise statement about what these errors are... one that's so short and so clear that we wouldn't have to spend 15 years discussing them.

[cr1m]

I think more of us who notice such issues shouldn't shy away from submitting feedback. At least one feature that I missed in the new GSC beta is now available there. Probably they had it in the works even without my feedback and probably many others, but still, doesn't hurt to try.