If you’ve noticed that your Yoast SEO Search Console report looks surprisingly empty, it’s because Google have shut down the system which provides data about their crawl errors.
There’s no need to worry, though – we knew this was coming, and we have plans for the future. Your Search Console report won’t show any information for now, but nothing on your site will break, and you don’t need to take any special action.
The good news is that we’re already building our own, brand new systems for error reporting and management. We think it’ll be even better and more useful than the old Google Search Console integration.
What happened?
If you actively manage your website’s SEO, then you’re probably familiar with Google Search Console. It’s a great way to discover and manage any errors which Google may have encountered when crawling and reading your site.
Until recently, Google provided us with a way to extract information from their systems. That meant that we could show you Google’s crawl errors and issues right inside your site’s admin area, via the Yoast SEO plugin.
Having those issues listed inside your side admin area made it easy for you to fix those issues ‘on the fly’. You could set up redirects, tweak pages, and mark individual issues as resolved – without ever leaving your website.
Unfortunately, Google have removed the API which powered this system.
That means it’s no longer possible for us – or anyone else – to get information about your crawl errors. The only way to get this information (at the moment) is for you to manually visit your Google Search Console account.
What does this mean for me?
Nothing will break on your website, and you don’t need to take any action. You’ll just find that if you visit your Search Console admin page in your WordPress website, you won’t see any errors. You’ll see something like this empty table:
That empty table doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t have any errors – it just means that we can’t fetch or show them to you.
If you want to go and check your errors and issues, you’ll need to go directly to your Search Console account. If you’re not sure where to start, you can follow this handy guide to using Search Console.
Creating and managing redirects
We know that many of our premium users rely on our Search Console integration to create redirects for broken pages and URLs.
If you’ve set up redirects through the Search Console section in the past, don’t worry – nothing’s been lost, and your redirects still work.
In the future, you’ll just need to use the ‘Redirects’ section to create them, instead.
We knew this was coming, but we expected a replacement system
We’ve known that Google planned to remove support for error reporting from their Search Console API for a while. It provided data from the ‘old’ Search Console system, which has been gradually replaced or removed as they moved people to the ‘new’ Search Console system. As such, we knew it had a short lifespan.
We’d hoped and assumed that they’d replace the API, in the same way that they’d moved or replaced other functionality from the old system.
What we didn’t expect was for them to simply ‘turn it off’, without providing an alternative or updated solution. We’re a little disappointed about how this has been handled by Google, but, we have some options.
What happens next?
For now, you don’t need to do anything.
We’re chasing Google for updates, and once we hear more from them about what they have planned – if anything – we’ll update our information to reflect that.
Their documentation and communications have hinted at planned future capabilities and support, but there’s nothing out there yet. So we’re waiting, watching, and asking questions about what’s in the pipeline (we’ve particularly high-hopes for Google’s SiteKit WordPress plugin, which is currently in beta).
In the meantime, we’re considering alternative options, processes, and ways in which we can replace or supplement this data. We already have some exciting plans:
In the short-term: We’ll be building an import tool, which lets you upload error reports which you’ve manually downloaded from Google Search Console. We’ll also support uploads from some other tools, which we’re excited about. We’ll share more news that soon.
In the mid-term: We’ll be looking to partner and integrate with a wide variety of your favourite SEO tools and platforms, so that we can import their data about your website’s errors and crawl issues. That’ll give us much richer, more diverse, and more interesting data than ever.
We’ll keep you updated with our progress, and we’ll let you know if we hear back from Google about their plans.