Google Refines Page Indexing Report in Search Console for Enhanced Issue Detection

The page indexing report in Google Search Console has been improved to show more specific indexing difficulties as of July 2. Although Google unintentionally forgot to annotate the report at the time, it promised to do so soon. This change attempts to clear up any misunderstandings regarding the increased error reports.

Some astute SEOs observed an increase in the difficulties listed in Search Console's indexing report. However, Google did not publish any annotations to explain it, leading people to believe that the problems were with their websites. After @Shelliweb blogged about it, John Mueller from Google tweeted about it:

"Anyone else seeing graph spikes in GSC for (not indexed), e.g. crawled, not indexed, 404s, blocked by robots.txt starting 2nd July? Seeing the same pattern across multiple websites. Can't see any data anomalies reported."

Google only posted the details of the data anomaly this morning. Google stated that as of July 2nd:

"Additional, more fine-grained page indexing issue information is now available. As a result, you may see a rise in the portion of issues being reported on. This is not a change in the processing of your website for Search, it is purely a reporting improvement."

Here’s the chart of Mr. Michelle:

John stated that

"Somehow the publishing of the annotation got delayed, sorry!" "We're adding an annotation: Additional, more fine-grained page indexing issue information is now available. As a result, you may see a rise in the portion of issues being reported on. This is not a change in the processing of your website for Search, it is purely in reporting."