Google's Mueller tells site owners to stop watching the Page Indexing report

A site owner posted on Reddit that their Search Console Page Indexing report had stopped updating on 16 October. Nothing had changed on the chart for ten days. Google's John Mueller replied. He said the report does not need to move often. Waiting for it is not a good use of time.

Search Engine Journal, which carries the story under reporter Roger Montti, quotes Mueller directly.

His first point: "Indexing doesn't change quickly, and when it does, you see that reflected in the performance reports first."

His second point was about report freshness in general. He said it does not make sense to comment on it for every report.

His third point names the trade-off. He said: "Complex systems are complex, and we prioritize faster updates there where we think it's actually useful."

His bluntest words to the Reddit poster were three: "save your energy."

What Mueller is actually drawing a line between

Mueller is separating two things that look similar from the outside. Google's crawling and indexing systems are one. Search Console's reporting on them is another. A page can be indexed, and ranking, without the Page Indexing report showing the change for days. The report is a lagging view of what the index already contains. The Performance report, which carries impressions, clicks and queries, updates faster, because that is the data most teams act on.

What this means for a release

The Page Indexing count is often the first proof a team looks for after a release. Mueller says that chart is a slow dial. Mueller's point is that the dial being slow is a product choice, not a bug. Google chooses which Search Console chart to update most often based on where it thinks a user will take action.

For a release of new pages, that means two things. First, use the URL Inspection tool to check a sample of the new URLs. It reads the current index state in near real time, one URL at a time. Second, watch the Performance report for the new URLs or query cluster. New impressions appear within a day or two for most sites. The Page Indexing report may take a week to catch up on the aggregate count. That gap is a feature of the product.

The wider line

This is also the second time this month a Google representative has told site owners to stop over-reading one chart. Gary Illyes said last week that most of what sites argue about on robots.txt is noise. Mueller is making the same case about the indexing report: the data is accurate, it just does not move at the speed people watching it would like.

Nothing on the index itself has changed. What has changed is how Google is managing the gap between a user's expectations and what the product reports. For a team running a search programme, the message is to pick the right chart for the question. "Did Google index our new pages?" is answered in URL Inspection. "Is traffic coming from them?" is answered in Performance. The Page Indexing report is for site-wide trend watching, over months, not days.

Source

Google Responds To Concern Over Search Console Indexing Reports, Search Engine Journal. Also reported by Search Engine Roundtable.