Google Search Console confusion

Mareka
Trailblazer
232 2 39

Hi All,

Can somebody please help me because Google just doesn't make sense to me. 

In Google Search Console I have 2 properties - I don't know how or why - https://treasureknot.com/ & https://www.treasureknot.com/. I don't go into the search console much because I don't understand it.

When I go into "Coverage" for the www. site, I see this only GSC 1.JPG

 

The //treasureknot.com "Coverage" shows the following  -

"All Known Pages" = 122 valid - which include pages listed for Submitted and indexed, Indexed, not submitted in sitemap (?) & 505 excluded - which include pages listed for Crawled - currently not indexed, Not found (404), Page with redirect, Discovered - currently not indexed, Alternate page with proper canonical tag, Duplicate without user-selected canonical, Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user, Blocked by robots.txt.

"All Submitted Pages" = 94 valid & 173 excluded.

I am extremely confused & freaked out ! In some of these sections, there are unexplained URLs, such as https://treasureknot.com/a/s/products/sea-star-crystal-glass-home-decor. The "a/s" ?????  https://treasureknot.com/search?q={query} - a mystery URL?? 

 

                                                                      

Replies 6 (6)

KieranR
Shopify Partner
333 27 115

Yeah there are a few typical "properties" you can have setup in GSC for a single domain - it is confusing.

PropertyType
sc:treasureknot.comDomain property
https://treasureknot.comURL property, secure, root domain (https://)
http://treasureknot.comURL property, insecure, root domain (http://)
https://www.treasureknot.comURL property, secure, www-subdomain (https://www.)
http://www.treasureknot.comURL property, insecure, www-subdomain (http://www.)


I prefer to use the "domain property" for most situations in GSC as it collates all data.

Technically you will have separate data is scoped into each URL property. Which one gets the data, depends on what is indexed, ranking & getting clicks in Google search. What is ranking really depends on your domain/redirect config. 

So in your case; https://treasureknot.com/ appears to be the 'primary' domain you've set in Shopify as primary (no-www, root domain), so in GSC you will see the most reliable data under that property, and also under the "domain property". 

The 'a' in that /a/s URL path appears to be an app proxy URL. Inspecting that example URL it appears to be rendering an AMP page version of your PDP. Then also looking at the URL: https://treasureknot.com/a/s it appears that you also have an AMP home page too. For example: 

KieranR_0-1621389804702.png

For context, an AMP page is kinda like a slimmed-down, alternate version of a page. It's a set of technical rules for HTML/resources which was pushed by Google so that they could actually host content at scale to try and get a faster search experience (or so they claim). Kinda similar to Facebooks Instant Articles. 

Anyway, hard to say if this is a problem in itself without looking into the setup and what's happening to traffic etc a bit deeper, but it appears they are at least canonicalized back to the primary /product/ URL.

Maybe you have an AMP app that's generating all this?

Full time Shopify SEO guy, based in NZ. Sometimes freelance outside the 9-5.
Mareka
Trailblazer
232 2 39

Hi Kieran, 

Thanks for replying.

This is all doing my head in to be honest. Is my www.treasureknot.com a sub-domain because I purchased the domain through Shopify ? My primary domain should be https://www.treasureknot.com as far as I am aware.

So should I / can I, start again with Google, re-submit sitemaps etc ?

I did add the AMP app recently but I didn't realise it changed URLs. Maybe I should uninstall it. 

KieranR
Shopify Partner
333 27 115

Yeah I mean the 'domain' is treasureknot.com so anything-dot is a 'sub-domain', the www-dot is a subdomain yes.

I'm just going by what I see when loading, when I access the site, I get https://domain.com without www's which is fine if that's what you want, probably not too big a deal if you want to change it really a preference/branding thing - doesn't affect SEO tooo much.

Yeah tbh not entirely sure on a fix, would need to crawl the site and have a hands-on explore to get a more definitive answer (if any). Sometimes google just takes a while to start to crawl a site, I've seen new sites take months for all the pages to get crawled/indexed correctly. How new is the domain? I'm wondering if it's an authority thing and establishing a baseline backlink profile (even just directory sites) could help to get over an initial barrier of trust, and help get you crawled a bit better. Could be a few things though.

The AMP pages might be okay if they are getting traffic, why not keep them? Technically they are not changing URLs they are creating separate/duplicate AMP-only URLs. If they are not then maybe not much point.

 

 

Full time Shopify SEO guy, based in NZ. Sometimes freelance outside the 9-5.
Mareka
Trailblazer
232 2 39

I purchased the domain in February 2020 but the store has only been "live" since about early October 2020.  I would prefer www but if it doesn't really affect anything so be it.  So should I just ignore all the "valid" & "excluded" numbers ? I notice the numbers for each change everyday.  It is all gobbledygook to me !

KieranR
Shopify Partner
333 27 115

Yeah it does seem concerning a bit. Getting a better backlink profile couldn't hurt. 

But as I said hard to answer the why with little information. You could go through a process of doing an SEO audit to help discover any deeper systemic crawl/indexation issues. At the the surface level looks fine to me, but I haven't checked that much.

If you want to DIY have a look for something like "ahrefs how to seo audit" or "anne cushing SEO audit checklist" there's plenty of guides out there. Tools like ScreamingFrog or Sitebulb are pretty cheap, and usually form a core part of that process.

Full time Shopify SEO guy, based in NZ. Sometimes freelance outside the 9-5.
Mareka
Trailblazer
232 2 39

Ok thanks for your help, much appreciated