Google temporarily disables issue validation in Search Console

Google has temporarily disabled yet another feature in Google Search Console, the issue validation function is currently disabled. Google said it is “temporarily disabled due to upcoming changes in the report.” There is not estimated time for when it will be fixed.

Issue validation. This feature lets you communicate to Google that you fixed an issue that is preventing Google from properly accessing your site or parts of your site. There is a “validate fix” button for your errors and when you click on it, Google has a workflow to validate that fix.

The notice. Here is the notice you would find when you access the Coverage report in Google Search Console:

More details. Google posted more details on this help document page saying “If you see a ‘validation temporarily disabled’ message in your report, this is because we’re updating some of the criteria for some issues in this report. This change does not affect validation requests that are currently in process, but new validation requests can’t be submitted until after we finish updating our issue criteria. Thank you for your patience.”

Request indexing tool. Over two months ago, Google also temporarily disabled the request indexing tool. Guess what, it is still disabled. Google’s John Mueller did tell us that he does expect it to be fixed before the end of the year.

Why we care. If you use this tool to try to get Google to recrawl and process pages, you might be out of luck, at least for the short term. For now, fix the issues on your end, try to submit a fix validation with Google but do not expect to see a response in Google Search Console. Google can still end up processing the fix without communicating that resolution in Search Console.

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.