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Google’s John Mueller answers a question regarding the accuracy of the average position metric which appears in the search performance report in Search Console.

This question is answered in the latest installment of the Ask Googlebot video series on the Google Search Central YouTube channel.

We learn from Mueller that the average position metric is based on real data. It’s a reliable measurement, even if it doesn’t always match up with what site owners see when they check their own ranking positions.

Read Mueller’s full response below.

Google’s John Mueller on Average Position Metric

Mueller begins his response by clarifying the average position metric is not theoretical. Like all metrics in the search performance report, average position is calculated using data from actual search results:

“The data in the Search Console search performance report is based on actual search results that were shown to users. It’s not a theoretical number, but rather a number based on actual results.”

Google Search Console tracks the average top position of a URL to calculate data for the search performance report.

If multiple URLs from a website appear in search results, Search Console will use the highest ranking URL to calculate the average.

The average position reported in Search Console may differ from what a site owner sees when looking up their own rankings in Google. Mueller says that could be due to factors such as personalization or geo-targeting.

“The average position is based on the average top position of a URL from your site. If there are multiple URLs from your website which are shown in the search results page we’ll use the topmost one for this average.

You might not always see the same position when you check yourself. That’s generally due to personalization, or geo-targeting, or because of short-lived visibility in search.

You can sometimes make assumptions that this is happening if you see a number of impressions which is significantly lower than what you’d expect for those queries. That’s usually a sign that your site was only visible for a small part of the overall impressions.”

“For web results keep in mind that your site might also be appearing in the images within the normal search results. In short, the average position and other metrics in the search performance report are based on actual search results, but actual search results can be quite varied.”

A Google Search Console help page further explains how average position is calculated using the topmost link to a page in search results:

If one query returned your property at positions 2, 4, and 6, its position is counted as 2 (the topmost position).

If a second query returned your property at positions 3, 5, and 9, its position is counted as 3 (the topmost position).

The average position across these two queries is (2 + 3)/2 = 2.5.

See the full video below.

You're reading Google Search Console: How Accurate Is The Average Position Metric?

Google Search Console Adds Reports For Guided Recipes

Google is adding support for Guided Recipes in Search Console, as well as the ability to validate the markup in the Rich Results Test tool.

Guided Recipe markup is designed to help walk users through a step-by-step process when searching for recipes in Google Assistant.

Google launched this feature two years ago, and until now site owners have not had an easy way of determining how well the markup is performing.

Further, Google has not offered a way to validate the markup in order to be sure it’s implemented correctly.

With the new features announced today Google is making up for those limitations:

— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) May 19, 2023

Updates to Search Console

Search Console will also report on the implementation of Guided Recipe markup, notifying site owners when errors are detected.

When an error has been fixed, site owners can use the same report to notify Google that a page has changed and should be recrawled.

Related: A Complete Guide to the Google Search Console

Updates to Rich Results Test Tool

Google has updated its Rich Results Test tool with the ability to validate Guided Recipe markup.

This allows site owners to check for errors on a per-page basis.

Site owners can even test their markup before a page goes live, as the Rich Results Test can analyze raw code as well as published pages.

In addition to validating the code, the tool can show site owners what the Guided Recipe markup will look like when rendered by Google Assistant.

These updates are now available for all sites utilizing Guided Recipe markup.

Source: Google

Related: SEO for Rich Results

5 Top Crawl Stats Insights In Google Search Console

There is one report in Google Search Console that’s both insanely useful and quite hard to find, especially if you’re just starting your SEO journey.

It’s one of the most powerful tools for every SEO professional, even though you can’t even access it from within Google Search Console’s main interface.

I’m talking about the Crawl stats report.

How Is Your Website Crawled?

Crawl budget (the number of pages Googlebot can and wants to crawl) is essential for SEO, especially for large websites.

If you have issues with your website’s crawl budget, Google may not index some of your valuable pages.

And as the saying goes, if Google didn’t index something, then it doesn’t exist.

Google Search Console can show you how many pages on your site are visited by Googlebot every day.

Armed with this knowledge, you can find anomalies that may be causing your SEO issues.

Diving Into Your Crawl Stats: 5 Key Insights

Here are all of the data dimensions you can inspect inside the Crawl stats report:

1. Host

Using the Crawl stats report, you can easily see the crawl stats related to each subdomain of your website.

Unfortunately, this method doesn’t currently work with subfolders.

2. HTTP Status

One other use case for the Crawl stats report is looking at the status codes of crawled URLs.

That’s because you don’t want Googlebot to spend resources crawling pages that aren’t HTTP 200 OK. It’s a waste of your crawl budget.

In this particular case, 16% of all requests were made for redirected pages.

If you see statistics like these, I recommend further investigating and looking for redirect hops and other potential issues.

In my opinion, one of the worst cases you can see here is a large amount of 5xx errors.

To quote Google’s documentation: “If the site slows down or responds with server errors, the limit goes down and Googlebot crawls less.”

If you’re interested in this topic, Roger Montti wrote a detailed article on 5xx errors in Google Search Console.

3. Purpose

The Crawl stats report breaks down the crawling purpose into two categories:

URLs crawled for Refresh purposes (a recrawl of already known pages, e.g., Googlebot is visiting your homepage to discover new links and content).

URLs crawled for Discovery purposes (URLs that were crawled for the first time).

This breakdown is insanely useful, and here’s an example:

I recently encountered a website with ~1 million pages classified as “Discovered – currently not indexed.”

This issue was reported for 90% of all the pages on that site.

(If you’re not familiar with it, “Discovered but not index” means that Google discovered a given page but didn’t visit it. If you discovered a new restaurant in your town but didn’t give it a try, for example.)

One of the options was to wait, hoping for Google to index these pages gradually.

Another option was to look at the data and diagnose the issue.

It turned out that, on average, Google was visiting only 7460 pages on that website per day.

But here’s something even more important.

Thanks to the Crawl stats report, I found out that only 35% of these 7460 URLs were crawled for discovery reasons.

That’s just 2611 new pages discovered by Google per day.

2611 out of over a million.

It would take 382 days for Google to fully index the whole website at that pace.

Finding this out was a gamechanger. All other search optimizations were postponed as we fully focused on crawl budget optimization.

4. File Type

GSC Crawl stats can be helpful for JavaScript websites. You can easily check how frequently Googlebot crawls JS files that are required for proper rendering.

If your site is packed with images and image search is crucial for your SEO strategy, this report will help a lot as well – you can see how well Googlebot can crawl your images.

5. Googlebot Type

Finally, the Crawl stats report gives you a detailed breakdown of the Googlebot type used to crawl your site.

You can find out the percentage of requests made by either Mobile or Desktop Googlebot and Image, Video, and Ads bots.

Other Useful Information

It’s worth noting that the Crawl stats report has invaluable information that you won’t find in your server logs:

DNS errors.

Page timeouts.

Host issues such as problems fetching the chúng tôi file.

Using Crawl Stats in the URL Inspection Tool

You can also access some granular crawl data outside of the Crawl stats report, in the URL Inspection Tool.

I recently worked with a large ecommerce website and, after some initial analyses, noticed two pressing issues:

Many product pages weren’t indexed in Google.

There was no internal linking between products. The only way for Google to discover new content was through sitemaps and paginated category pages.

A natural next step was to access server logs and check if Google had crawled the paginated category pages.

But getting access to server logs is often really difficult, especially when you’re working with a large organization.

Google Search Console’s Crawl stats report came to the rescue.

Let me guide you through the process I used and that you can use if you’re struggling with a similar issue:

1. First, look up a URL in the URL Inspection Tool. I chose one of the paginated pages from one of the main categories of the site.

In this case, the URL was last crawled three months ago.

Keep in mind that this was one of the main category pages of the website that hadn’t been crawled for over three months!

I went deeper and checked a sample of other category pages.

It turned out that Googlebot never visited many main category pages. Many of them are still unknown to Google.

I don’t think I need to explain how crucial it is to have that information when you’re working on improving any website’s visibility.

The Crawl stats report allows you to look things like this up within minutes.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, the Crawl stats report is a powerful SEO tool even though you could use Google Search Console for years without ever finding it.

It will help you diagnose indexing issues and optimize your crawl budget so that Google can find and index your valuable content quickly, which is particularly important for large sites.

I gave you a couple of use cases to think of, but now the ball is in your court.

How will you use this data to improve your site’s visibility?

More Resources:

Image Credits

All screenshots taken by author, April 2023

What Is The Correct Hand Position For Typing?

Do you feel your typing speed on the keyboard is too slow, or are you making too many typos in each sentence?

The chances are that you have been typing wrong all this time, where the primary culprit is your incorrect hand position.

You heard it right! Hand position and posture matter a lot when typing on a keyboard.

The correct hand position for typing generally includes straight hands, arms bent to 90 degrees, and fingers curved over the keys (A, S, D, F, and J, K, L, semi-colon) with thumbs resting near the spacebar.

Moreover, the wrist should float above the keyboard with a slight positive tilt to prevent carpal tunnel risks.

Read more to find the best hand position when typing to increase productivity.

Does Hand Position Matter in Typing?

In short, yes! A correct hand position will be a game-changer when it comes to typing.

Most computer users make the mistake of incorrectly resting their hands on the keyboard, affecting their productivity and health.

Poor typing and posture can lead to many problems, including repetitive strain injury (RSI) of muscles and tendons.

The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons points out that RSI, carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS), and cubital tunnel syndrome are more familiar to users with poor typing practice.

ProblemSpecification

Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI)Damage to muscles, tendons, or nerves is caused by repetitive motions such as typing, moving the mouse, writing, etc.

Cubital Tunnel SyndromeWhen you bend the elbow often, the ulnar nerve gets irritated or compressed inside your elbow.

MedilinePlus.Gov reports that carpal tunnel syndrome is estimated to affect 1 to 5 percent of adults annually, with the incidence of CTS and repetitive injury rising, with 1-3 cases per 1000 subjects yearly.

Although cubital tunnel syndrome is less seen than carpal tunnel syndrome, it has risen, especially among computer users.

Therefore, the proper hand position is essential to ward off health problems.

However, experts point out that your hands, shoulder, and body should align with the keyboard to increase productivity.

When your overall position is correct, you can type on the keyboard continuously with speed and precision without feeling sore fingers or hands.

What is the Correct Hand Position for Typing?

Ideally, your hands (palm and finger) and forearms should sit parallel to the keyboard.

However, it may be impossible to attain this posture when your shoulders are broader than the keyboard and your body posture is wrong.

Therefore, the key is maintaining an overall body posture, considering your hand, wrist, elbow, shoulder, and distance between the keyboard and upper body.

Overall, body posture and comfort are far more critical.

Let us look at different factors that will affect your typing.

1. Finger Position While Typing

Let us talk about finger placement on the QWERTY keypad, as this keypad format is more prevalent in several regions of the world, including the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia,

The basic rule of using the QWERTY keypad is to place your finger on the home row keys.

Left Fingers: Pinky (A), Ring (S), Middle (D), and Index (F)

Right Fingers: Pinky (J), Ring (K), Middle (L), and Index (; or semi-colon)

The home row keys are where you place your finger when learning to type.

Your fingers are precisely positioned at the center to help press the surrounding keys quickly, where each finger is used to reach the keys diagonally above and below it.

For example, your left pinky will tackle the closest keys, such as the control menu, Tab, Caps Lock, and Shift, on the far left, whereas the right pinky will tackle Enter key on the far right.

Imagine a game of soccer where players only tackle the opponent close to them; usually, a defender will take on the forward player or striker.

Similarly, your thumb hovers over the space bar, ready to punch the key.

Assuming this finger’s position also helps build muscle memory, so you can remember each key’s position and press them without looking.

Many newbies only use their index fingers, which is good for a starter but the worst for quick typing.

With both hands’ four fingers on the home row, there should be eight fingers on the home row.

Hence, you will not reach anywhere with it and risk repetitive strain injury.

Assuming the correct finger position on the keyboard is a must.

Keep your fingers curved instead of flat to press each key accurately and efficiently.

Here is a detailed video describing typing on the keyboard with proper finger position.

2. Wrist Position While Typing

Does your wrist stiffen and tingle with pain after spending time on your keyboard? You may be overstressing your wrist, leading to swollen tendons and carpal tunnel.

The forearms will sag as your hands get tired from typing, exerting pressure on the wrists and forcing you to bend them to adjust to the changing pressure.

Moreover, the back-and-forth wrist adjustment creates friction, also known as microtrauma.

Therefore, as shown in the image below, the only way to ensure a correct wrist position is to tilt your keyboard slightly negatively (4-8 degrees).

You can assume this position when the thumb is in line with the forearm and the wrist is bent slightly back, similar to hanging your arm at your side.

The negatively tilted keyboard will help keep your wrist straight or float horizontally.

Most manufacturers design the keyboard with a positive or neutral tilt, requiring you to buy it with custom feet to raise it per your preference.

However, do not let your wrists droop when typing, as your hands will tire more quickly.

Consider taking frequent breaks and performing wrist exercises to prevent stiffness and pain.

Similarly, use wrist rests only when resting your wrist but typing and resting your wrists when typing will create contortions that hurt your hands.

Perform wrist extension and flexion stretches to help relax your wrists and increase mobility. Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR) will help ward off wrist problems.

3. Body Position While Typing

Body posture may not be the most exciting topic, but it significantly improves typing and prevents health problems.

As we have explained the correct finger and wrist position, let us delve into other essential aspects.

a. Feet and legs

The correct sitting posture in front of a computer is to sit up straight with your feet and toes facing the computer.

A medical blog attests that it naturally puts less stress on the musculoskeletal system (bones, joints, and ligaments).

An improved posture means you can stay in the same position for a longer duration of time.

Similarly, avoid tucking your legs in or extending forward, and keep both soles firmly on the ground.

b. Arms and Shoulder

Keep the keyboard at a height that allows your elbows to be bent 90 degrees and not too wide from the body.

Keeping your arm at 90 degrees supports the shoulder to avoid slouching or hunching them.

Similarly, avoid resting the lower arm and wrist on the desk to assume a correct arm position. Here is how you should place your arm when typing.

c. Sitting Posture

Overall, sitting posture is probably far more critical.

You must have been consistently taught that posture should be upright when sitting, but it is the opposite.

It would help if you naturally assumed the reclining position to keep your body straight because reclining will help you pull the keyboard towards you instead of leaning towards the keyboard.

A study indicates that sitting upright (90-degrees) may lead to chronic back pain, while reclining at 135- degrees will improve the biomechanical sitting position.

Many Zero Gravity workstations are commonly found in many home offices and workplaces.

Similarly, your neck should be level with the screen, with eyes straight to the top line of the screen.

How to Type Like a Professional?

Practice typing daily using the software that helps improve your finger position and typing speed from easy to complex.

Choose an online typing course where the typed letters and words are read aloud to help you remember them.

Do not look down at the keypad; instead, imagine the keyboard and feel your way through it. (Making the same mistakes will help you remember and prevent them the next time).

Assume your finger, wrist, and arm naturally to avoid musculoskeletal strain and tired arms.

Learn keyboard shortcuts such as hotkeys (CTRL+A for select all) to complete the task quickly.

Choose a right sized keyboard: A full-sized keyboard will be appropriate for users with broader shoulders to avoid constraining their arms.

Keep your mouse and keyboard close together and in line to avoid moving your hand too far from the keyboard.

More than 3,000 English words utilize the left hand alone when using QWERTY, and about 300 use the right hand. Hence, be prepared to tackle more typing with your left hand.

Take regular breaks. Take a 5-minute break after every 30 minutes of continuous activity to avoid musculoskeletal strain and injury.

Conclusion

Essential finger positioning is relatively straightforward, but it may take some time to speed up your typing and accuracy.

Ensure that your wrist, palm, and arm are in the correct position to decrease the risk of musculoskeletal issues.

Moreover, maintain a slightly reclined sitting posture to improve overall body posture.

With some practice and consistency, you can quickly type like a professional.

Related Article: What is the Ergonomic Position for Keyboard and Mouse?

Office Wars: Microsoft, Google, And Apple Jockey For Position

Most people have gotten past the sentiment that tablets can’t be used for “real work”. The simple reality is that a tablet is capable of doing most of the core functions a traditional PC can perform: email, Web surfing, social networking, instant messaging, and so forth. But, before you rush out to get a tablet to replace your laptop you should be aware that your choice of productivity apps may be dictated by your mobile platform.

Why? There are a variety of factors involved, and it depends on which combination of office suite and mobile platform you’re talking about.

Choosing a tablet may depend on which office software is available for which platform

Google has stated that it has no current plan to develop for Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8. I assume the existing versions that work with Windows 7 will continue to work in desktop mode on Windows 8 systems, and that Google is referring specifically to developing apps for the Modern UI to be offered through the Windows App Store.

Clay Bavor, the product management director at Google Apps, told tech blog V3, “We have no plans to build out Windows apps. We are very careful about where we invest and will go where the users are but they are not on Windows Phone or Windows 8. If that changes, we would invest there, of course.”

Meanwhile, a TabTimes story suggests that Microsoft and Apple are having a tough time working out the details to bring Microsoft Office apps to iOS. The speculation is that the Office iOS apps themselves will be free, but full functionality will require a subscription to Office 365. Based on Apple developer terms, if Microsoft sells Office 365 from within the apps, Apple is supposed to get a 30 percent cut.

Those are a couple of examples from a complex landscape of competing interests. Microsoft and Google are the dominant competitors when it comes to office productivity software, and Apple has its own productivity software as well. Microsoft, Google, and Apple also compete against each other in the mobile platform arena.

Google would obviously prefer that businesses and individuals use Google Apps for their productivity needs, but they’d also like to see people using Android tablets, or Chromebooks built on Google’s Chrome OS. Similarly, Microsoft would like to drive sales of its own tablet ecosystem, but it also recognizes that iOSand Android are the dominant platforms, and it has a vested interest in making Microsoft Office available to all.

Aside from the competitive strategy of balancing office suite and mobile platform sales, there’s the matter of limited resources. The statement from Google doesn’t really sound like sour grapes over offering its software on a Microsoft mobile platform as much as it seems like a calculated decision about how to use resources most effectively. Windows RT and Windows Phone 8 are simply not a big enough market to warrant the effort from Google.

What does that mean for you? Well, it means that you need to consider what office productivity software is available for each mobile platform, and factor that into your tablet purchasing decisions. If you rely on Google Apps, a Surface RT probably isn’t the best choice right now, and if you depend on Microsoft Office, you may not want to buy an iPad or Android tablet.

It would be nice if the office suites were more platform-agnostic and you could get Google Apps or Microsoft Office apps no matter which tablet OS you choose, but that’s not the case—at least not yet. For now, you need to consider the bigger picture of how you plan to use the tablet, and which tools or applications you will need to interact with in order to choose the tablet that will work best for you.

Disk Management Console View Is Not Up

Disk Management is a built-in Windows program that is used to maintain partitions and drives on your system. Usually, carrying out any task in the utility is hassle-free as it is well optimized to work on Windows systems, however, a lot of users have complained that when they try to do the same, they see the following error message.

The operation failed to complete because the Disk Management console view is not up-to-date.  Refresh the view by using the refresh task.  If the problem persists close the Disk Management console, then restart Disk Management or restart the computer.

In this article, we are going to see what you need to do if your Disk Management Console View Is Not Up-to-date.

Many users have complained that the error message is stopping them from doing any task on a newly added drive. So, first and foremost, we need to the health of that drive into consideration. Usually, the hardware is not at the fault, but the driver is. We are going to see how to resolve that as well. We should also check the health of your computer and make sure that the OS files are not corrupted. There is a utility to fix that as well. However, we would recommend you to go through our solutions one by one and resolve the issue.

Fix Disk Management console view is not up-to-date

If you are seeing “The operation has failed because the Disk Management console view is not up-to-date” then check out the following solutions to resolve this issue.

Restart Disk Management and/or computer

Check if Automount is enabled

Reinstall Disk Drivers

Update Disk Drives

Run SFC

Let us talk about them in detail.

1] Restart Disk Management and/or computer

First up, we need to do as the error box is guiding, we need to restart the Disk Management utility and see if that works. If the issue is because of some glitch, this should resolve it. In case restarting the app doesn’t work, try restarting the computer. This can stop any service and processes that could have interfered with your program. Do this and check if the issue persists.

Read: Disk Management not working, loading or responding in Windows

2] Check if Automount is enabled

Automount is a service that works in order to mount every new disk. If it is disabled, you won’t be able to see the attached disk in the File Explorer (My Computer). And since you are seeing this issue, we are presuming that your system is failing to mount new drives.

We are going to use Command Prompt to check if the process is enabled and if it is not, we need to run a few commands. Open Command Prompt as an administrator from the Start Menu and execute the following commands.

diskpart automount

If it is enabled for new volumes, you can move to the next solution. But if it’s disabled, execute the following command to enable Automount.

automount enable

Once, you have enabled the service, restart your computer and check if the issue persists. It will work, but it may not resolve the issue for you. So, what we would recommend you is reinstall the drivers. We have mentioned the guide in the next solution.

Read: Fix Disk Management errors on Windows.

3] Reinstall Disk Drivers

One of the reasons why you are seeing the error message in question is that your Disk Drivers got corrupted. We need to reinstall it and hopefully, it will get resolved.

Unplug the device

Open Device Manager.

Expand Disk Drives.

This way, the driver will be installed on your system. Restart your computer, and check if the issue persists.

4] Update Disk Drivers

If reinstalling doesn’t work, then we have to update those drivers. This will you in resolving the issue, especially, if it is occurring due to outdated drivers or a bug. What you need to do is go through the following methods, pick one for yourself, and update those drivers.

One of them will do the job for you.

5] Run System File Checker

If nothing works, then maybe some of your system files are corrupted. We need to run a command in cmd and hopefully, it will resolve the issue for you. Open Command Prompt as an administrator and execute the following command.

sfc /scannow

It will take some time, so, wait for the process to complete.

Hopefully, these solutions have allowed you to use Disk Management again.

Read: Windows not assigning Drive letters automatically

How do I restart Disk Management? How do I view disk drives on Windows 11?

The easiest way to view disk drives on Windows 11 is to open File Explorer. By default, File Explorer opens to Home or Quick Access. Hence, to view your disk drives, you have to go to This PC. You can also make File Explorer always open to This PC. In addition to this, you can also view your disk drives in the Disk Management app.

That’s it!

Also Read: Couldn’t Mount File, The disk image isn’t initialized.

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