Google Search Console AMP enhancement report to combine issue types

Google is changing how they show some of the issues within Google Search Console for the AMP enhancement report. Google said they will combine some over-specific issue types into fewer generalized issue types within the report in an effort designed to separate issues into “more manageable groups” for webmasters.

What is the AMP enhancement report? The report helps you fix errors that prevent your AMP pages from appearing in Google Search results with AMP-specific features.

What is changing? Google said they are combining “some over-specific issue types into fewer generalized issue types.” For example, old specific issues that were for (a) “The attribute ‘title’ in tag ‘a’ is set to ‘cat’, which is incorrect” or (b) “The attribute ‘title’ in tag ‘a’ is set to ‘dog’, which is incorrect” would be grouped into this single generic error “The attribute ‘title’ in tag ‘a’ is incorrect.”

What to look out for? When this migration of consolidation of errors is complete, you “will see an increase in generic issue types with a corresponding decrease in the specific issue types that were combined into the general type,” Google said. Do not panic, this is only because Google is grouping issues into a more generic category. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have more errors.

Why is Google doing this? Google said “this will simplify issue types into more manageable groups for you.” But will this give you less actionable data? We’ll see.

Verifying fixes won’t work. Google said that during migration of this data you will not be able to verify issues as fixed in Google Search Console. Google also will be updating historical data for the previous three months of data, starting in September.

Why you should care. With any changes to Google Search Console reports, marketers, webmasters and SEOs need to know what the report means, what the numbers within them represent and what changes impact the outcome of such metrics.

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.