Confirmed: Google Removes “Not Selected” From Webmaster Tools

Google has confirmed the reports of the removal of the “not selected” filter within Google Webmaster Tool’s Index Status report.

Google’s John Mueller said it was removed because it “was causing more confusion than actually helping webmasters with their sites.”

That may be true, but many webmasters found the data useful. In fact, there were times when John from Google said himself that “not selected” data can be useful in some situations.

Here is the comment from Google’s John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analysts in Google Zurich.

Yep, this was removed on purpose since it was causing more confusion than actually helping webmasters with their sites.

Previously, the “not selected” would mean either:

• It redirects to another page
• It has a rel=”canonical” to another page
• Our algorithms have detected that its contents are substantially similar to another URL and picked the other URL to represent the content.

This news come shortly after many reports of Google Webmaster Tools having issues with reporting the number of links pointing to a site.

For more details on the index status report, see our article named Google “Reveals Index Secrets”: Charts Indexing of Your Site Over Time.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.