Google Search Console

Google Search Console helps you determine your site’s Google search traffic and performance, as well as troubleshoot issues.

Definition

The Google Search Console (GSC), also called Google Webmaster Tools at the time, is a free analysis and service tool from Google.

The search engine giant attaches great importance to clean and hard-wearing programmed websites . So that the webmasters can interpret and manage the data of their website correctly, there is this tool.

Here is a very simply explained video about Google Search Console:

General

Google Search Console is used to make a variety of adjustments to websites or apps, look into statistics, and put optimizations into action.

The optimization of the web pages serves to keep of course also the quality for target pages of advertisement over Google AdWords and/or publishing house web pages for Google AdSense on a high level.

Webmasters are alerted to non-natural backlinks or malware installed on websites.

Google Search Console data is public and can be linked to Google Analytics for data collection. Google gets additional insights into the design and the relativity of the website data via the data maintenance of the webmaster tools.

Prerequisite for the use

The prerequisite for the use of the Google Search Console is to register the affected pages first. For the registration a current and valid Google account is needed, which the operator of the account must verify at the same time.

Afterwards, commonly used functions can be used and decisive values can be displayed in the tool.

There are several account verification methods to choose from. It is advisable to confirm via a valid Analytics account, the Google Tag Manager, an HTML tag or via the domain name provider.

Functions

Google Search Console contains a super large number of settings and features.
The settings are necessary for the analysis and optimization of a website.
We have briefly summarized the functions for you:

With the help of the XML sitemap you can give all URLs of a web page for Google to confess. While this does not guarantee future indexing, it does increase the ability for accessible page elements to be crawled. In addition, on top of that, via the GWT also an exclusive image sitemap or a video sitemap is placed. Each sitemap is checked for errors by the tool after the upload.

The Data Highlighter role allows you to essentially flag the post of a web page so Google can see the differentiation of data like the opening time or price.

GWT’s Disavow tool has been the most talked about tool in the SEO scene over the past few years. If a webmaster is of the opinion that these links are probably rather harmful, incoming links can be declared invalid. Some SEO users assume that Google uses the data of this tool to uncover link networks.

The website settings and improving the HTML:
Here you can select the preferred country, set the default domain format (with or without WWW), as well as adjust the crawl speed up to two server requests per second. You should automatically tackle Google’s settings if you don’t know the server’s performance. To improve the HTML, Google kindly provides optimization potential for meta titles and meta descriptions here.

Remove URLs from the index or ignore URL parameters:
One of the most significant settings of Search Console is the temporary removal of URLs from the Google index. If individual subpages unintentionally end up in the index, this makes a lot of sense. The GWT is there for SEOs and webmasters to declare individual parameters of a URL, for SEOs and webmasters to be insignificant. You decide if the parameter has an influence on the content or if it is about “utm”, a tracking parameter.

If a robots.txt file is included, you can analyze it with Search Console as well as test new instructions for the bot. With the retrieval by a Googlebot, web pages can be viewed like a spider and thus syntax errors can be unveiled. It allows to render the page completely.

You can add a website and the associated URLs directly to the Google index after it is retrieved with “Retrieve as by Google”. Here, different URLs can be indexed at once.

Checking structured data and checking rich cards:
You can use Google Search Console to check whether a website uses so-called microformats or other structured data. The GSC checks whether a website uses rich cards.

AMP Check:
If a website has been converted to AMP, then it can check the implementation thanks to Search Console.

Test mobile friendliness:
The GSC explains whether URLs are suitable for mobile device use.

hreflang test:
If a website has several languages as well as country versions and is internationally oriented, these can be nominated with hreflang. The GSC can monitor these tags.

blocked resources:
If important resources of a web page are not loaded or prevent the Googlebot from indexing, the Google Search Console shows this to the users.

Statistics Tools

In addition to the “active” features, Search Console promises a rich database of statistics.

Via the dashboard, the webmaster receives an overview of the crawling errors, search queries, DNS status, the generality of the robots.txt and the errors in the sitemap and URLs. Identical to Google Analytics, the GSC also promises an impression of search queries, CTR and clicks, as well as rankings of single keywords. These statistics are downloaded or determined to a specific period, in any case, this data is regularly displayed in the GSC only for the last 90 days .

Google Search Console serves users with monitoring on the inbound links that Google registers. The display of backlinks is usually lower and in contrast to paid backlink tools GWT do not crawl as low. Google notes how many links go off internally from the subpages belonging to it and thus promises an overview to be used. It is an important clue for OnPage optimization. The indexing status indicates how the indexing takes place.

This metric is useful for reading off conceivable penalties. Among other things, the GSC shows whether and how many pages of a website have been added to the index and which of them have been removed. Among other things, Google provides in the HTML improvement, the possible need for optimization for meta descriptions and titles. Search Console points out here about 404 errors (crawl errors) or soft 404 errors, in the desktop and mobile versions.

Notifications from Google

If you register your website with the Google Search Console, you will not only be informed in case of server problems or some software updates like WordPress, but you will also get a message in case of problems like crawling. Google reports possible spam or a hack via the Security Issues feature.

If Google finds a violation of copyrights or unnatural links, then a message can be sent to the webmaster via the Manual Action item.

Relevance for SEO

The Google Search Console is the communicative interface between your domain and Google and a useful tool for every webmaster and search engine optimizer. In addition to analyses of meta data, notifications of error messages are also displayed. Another big advantage is the data highlighter, which makes it easy to set markups. If you deposit the XML sitemap, you can send all subpages of a domain to Google.

Conclusion

Google Search Console performance reports give you a comprehensive overview of your website’s health and relevance in search results. Also the individual small tools and setting possibilities make it possible for you to step in with problems or improvement suggestions.