I received an email from Google about issues... what do I do?

When you sign up to Google Search Console and submit your store, you may receive emails from Google about various issues.

This is nothing to worry about; most of the time, they are minor warnings that can be ignored and do not affect your Google search rankings.

How to find more details

The email will only give you a summary, and to find out more details, click the link in the email to get to your Google Search Console account.

Look for "Indexing -> Pages" in the left-hand menu. This will give you more information about which pages are indexed and show you any errors.

You can also check the links under "Experience" in the left-hand menu. This will tell you about any issues with mobile usability, speed, SSL etc.

Contacting FreshStore Support about Google Issues

Our support team will happily check any of the issues Google reported and advise you.

Before contacting us, please first check for more details as above, and tell us exactly which pages on your store have issues. The more information you can provide, the easier it is for us to help you quickly.

About Specific Issue Types

Here are some emails you might receive with explanations:

• Alternate page with proper canonical tag - This is a notice and not an error. Nothing needs to be fixed. It means that Google found the same page on two or more URLs, and the correct one was found successfully and indexed.

  
  
• New Page indexing issues detected - This can be caused by a few things. Please check inside your Google Search Console for more details.

  • Not Found (404) - This is when Google tries to crawl a page on your store but it is not found. This can happen if a product/category/brand/article etc. is deleted, and if so then this is normal and no action is needed. It could also be due to an incorrect link somewhere - click into your Google Search Console to find out more about the 404 and see if you need to fix any links.

    
    

• New Merchant listings structured data issues detected - This is related to the structured data that we provide to Google about products, also known as "Rich Snippets". It is usually because one or two products are missing some data (e.g. shipping details) and this requires no action.

  
  

• New Mobile Usability issues detected - This is when a page on your store does not work perfectly on mobile devices. This is usually a false positive. Please see this guide on Checking for Mobile Usability with Google for more info.

  
  
• New Product Snippets Structured Data Issues - This is usually because a product doesn't have any offers available. Click into your Google Search Console to see which product it is. You can then check this product and see what the issue is.

Do I need to do anything?

Most of the time you don't need to do anything about these emails from Google. Most likely, it is a timing issue that will correct itself e.g. a product was deleted and Google didn't know about it yet.

However, if you are in any doubt you can contact our support team with the details and we will clarify it for you.