Search Console warnings decoded: five worth acting on (and three to ignore)

Google Search Console means well, but it reports everything at the same volume. A missing hreflang tag and a hacked site get similar-looking red text. Here is a field guide: what deserves action today, and what you can safely stop worrying about.

Act on these

1. "Submitted URL returned 404" on important pages. If products or key landing pages return 404s, Google removes them from the index while customers still hold the bookmarks. Restore the pages or 301-redirect them to the closest live equivalent.
2. "Duplicate without canonical". Google found copies of a page and cannot tell which one to rank, so it picks — sometimes the wrong one. One canonical link per page solves it; e-commerce filters and pagination are the usual suspects.
3. Clickable elements too close together. On phones, taps land on the wrong link. Since most shop traffic is mobile, this is direct revenue damage, not a technicality.
4. "No hreflang return tags". If you run multiple languages, Google does not believe your language versions reference each other correctly — so it may show the French page to German buyers. Fix with correct hreflang pairs; the tags must be static HTML, identical for every visitor, or caches will serve half the pair.
5. Security actions (hacked content, malware). Drop everything else. This is the one warning that can remove you from search entirely.

Safe to ignore (or almost)

• "Crawled - currently not indexed" for thin utility pages. Google saw them and chose not to rank them — for tag archives and parameter pages that is the algorithm working correctly.
• Sitemap "couldn't fetch" flapping right after submission. Resubmit once, wait a week; it usually resolves itself.
• "Page with redirect" occurrences. Informational: Google followed your redirects fine. Act only if a chain runs longer than two hops.

The weekly habit

Five minutes a week: open Coverage, sort by error, and ask one question — would a customer notice this? Customers notice 404s on products and broken mobile taps; nobody notices tag archives not being indexed. Treat Search Console as a to-do list where three items matter and the rest is ambience. And when a warning keeps appearing after you fixed it, check that the fix actually reaches Google's crawler — caches love serving old HTML.