Why Doesn't Google Search Console Show Any Traffic for Certain Versions of Your Domain?

John Mueller reminds us of a fundamental principle: Google Search Console cannot track traffic for non-indexed URL versions. Concretely, if you have configured 301 redirects from your variants (http://, without www, etc.) to your canonical version, these intermediate versions will not appear in your traffic reports.

This situation is perfectly normal and even desirable. The alerts you may receive in GSC on this subject do not indicate a problem, but simply that Google detects links pointing to these non-indexed versions.

Common sources of these links are:

• Your own XML sitemaps that reference the wrong URL versions
• Your internal linking with hard-coded links to non-canonical variants
• External backlinks pointing to old versions of your URLs
• Configuration errors in your templates or CMS

Mueller recommends using the URL inspection tool to identify the exact source of these references and verify that your redirects are working correctly.

This clarification from Mueller is completely consistent with the technical functioning of GSC. The console only reports data for URLs that are actually crawled and potentially indexable. URLs that immediately redirect to another version generate no traffic data, since users never actually access them.

However, one point needs to be nuanced: the absence of traffic in GSC does not mean that these redirects have no SEO impact. Multiple redirect chains can slow down crawling and slightly dilute the transmitted PageRank. Additionally, if Google detects too many contradictory signals (internal links to different variants), it can create confusion in determining the canonical URL.

Following this statement, here are the concrete actions to implement to optimize your configuration:

• Audit your XML sitemaps to verify that they only contain the canonical version of your URLs (with or without www, HTTPS protocol only)
• Check your redirects: make sure that all variants (http, https, www, non-www) redirect with a 301 to a single canonical version
• Use the URL inspection tool in GSC to identify the sources of links to the wrong variants
• Fix your internal linking so that all your links point directly to the canonical version
• Configure your canonical tags correctly to reinforce signals toward your preferred version
• Avoid redirect chains: redirect directly to the final destination rather than creating multiple redirects
• Document your canonical version in an internal guide so that the entire team always uses the same URLs