#10945 – Google Search Console Integration

Hi

You're not doing anything wrong: you are however in fact not connected.

If you were correctly connected, that text would read "You are connected for the property https://yoursite.com with access...".

This message is misleading and it's being reworked. 4SEO has a hardtime detecting if it's in fact connected or not, due to the way the authorization process is handled at the moment.

In short, we have an authorization token from Google, so 4SEO thinks it's connected. But Google has invalidated that authorization tokens since 4SEO got it (they do that for various reasons, at any time) and so we are in fact not connected.

The fix is simple:

 - click the Disconnect button

- connect again

So no sitemaps have been submitted so far.

That's true but not really an issue. 4SEO announces your sitemap in your robots.txt file, per the standard, and so Google already found it anyway.

Submitting the sitemap through the Search Console connection is ideal, fast and quick but it's only really a matter of gaining a little bit of time when letting Google know that you in fact have a sitemap.

Note that submitting through the Search Console is not any better than advertising the sitemap in robots.txt as usual. It won't make Google read the sitemap or use its content any faster or more than when they find it by themselves. Submitting through Search Console is only about making Google aware quickly and reliably that you have sitemap.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

Sorry, forgot about the other items:

In the Dashboard section "You should connect 4SEO to the Google Search Console. You don't seem to be using any analytics provider".

That's not what the Dashboard message says, you have mixed together 2 separate messages:

1 - "You should connect 4SEO to the Google Search Console"

2 - "You don't seem to be using any analytics provider"

Analytics is not related to the Search Console (and the message does not mention the Search Console). What 4SEO is saying here is that you did not create an Analytics rule within 4SEO to inject an Analytics provided snippet. You may be using another method to inject an Analytics code snippet into your site, for instance, or decided to not use any Analytics provider at all, which is fine as well.

As with all these messages, use the Dismiss button (or possibly the Remind me later button) once you have read them and decided whether they are appropriate or not.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

You're welcome! 

About "canonical", this paragraph may help. But the short story is:

- one issue most search engines have is if the same page can be accessed through multiple pages. For instance if:

https://www.example.com/some-article

https://example.com/some-article

https://example.com/some-article?fbclid=1693sdfdsfgdgdgfdjhgfdjhfd

https://www.example.com/blog/some-article

are all valid links, found somewhere on your site or on the internet, and they all display in fact the same page, then:

- search engines have to load and analyze them all, because they think they are different page (and they can't tell they are the same until they analyzed them all)

- the SEO "quality" signals (backlinks from other sites typically, but also content analysis) are split between different URLs, while in fact they relate to the same page

- they don't know which URL is the "desired" one

On small sites ( a few hundred pages maybe), they don't care too much, they have enough "power" to load all pages and see that they are the same. And so they pick one URL and decide it's going to be the main one. And they assign all quality signals to any of the pages to that main URL.

That main URL is called the "canonical URL" for that page, and the other pages in the same "cluster" are called "duplicates.

Now on larger sites, this is a bigger issue because:

- Google in particular may stop looking at (new) pages  on your site if they think there's a chance they are duplicates of known pages, or just because you have a history of having duplicates. Of course this is an issue because they may miss some or a lot of your content. Or they may waste time on some useless content and not bother about your real, good, new content.

And so 4SEO has a feature where it detects that situation and adds specific metadata to your site pages, which tell search engines that page A is a canonical one and page B, C, D,... are duplicates of page A. 

That way, Google knows which page it should analyze and rank, and which pages it should not.

Of course:

- 4SEO can get that wrong sometimes, so you can manually modify the choice 4SEO made

- Google may decide they don't care about this metadata (a "canonical" tag) and do whatever they want to do.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

https://weeblr.com