Why You Should Be Using Google Search Console
Google Search Console, formerly known as Webmaster Tools, is an invaluable line of communication provided by Google to ensure website owners do all they can to help it to ‘see’ your website.
Other search engines such as Bing provide a similar service, but while Google remains the number one search engine, its tools are likely to be the most useful. For more information, take a look at this guide to Search Console, courtesy of Search Engine Watch.
Top Reasons for Using Google Search Console
1. Message Panel and Email Updates
Google Search Console is adept at recognising errors on your site, but you don’t need to be monitoring your account 24/7 to find out when and where these errors occur. Rather, Search Console will provide an update via email whenever it encounters an issue, ensuring that you are always aware if there is a problem on your website. If your site goes down or is infected by malware, Search Console will send a message to the chosen email address. It also sends alerts for other health issues such as crawl errors and sends up-to-date information on changes to Search Console, their Webmasters Guidelines and other current advice.
2. Save the preferred version of your domain name
Google will treat different versions of the same domain name as two separate pages. By usingGoogle Search Console to select a preferred, or canonical domain name Google will treat them as the same address and use your preferred version in search results.
3. Submit your xml sitemap
You can point Google directly to your xml sitemap by submitting it on Search Console. This will guide the Googlebots to the most important areas of your website and speed up the crawling process. Your sitemap will also tell Google when pages were last updated, help to identify other versions of the page (for example, in an alternate language), and identify discrepancies between your site map and crawled pages.
4. Suggest a crawl rate.
Google’s goal is to crawl as many pages as possible, as quickly as possible. However, there may be areas of your website that do not need crawling very often, perhaps because they are rarely updated and areas you might want crawled every day, or even more frequently. If this is the case you can use Search Console to mark pages as high or low priority. The Googlebots won’t necessarily heed this advice, but it’s worth doing anyway if crawls are slowing down your site.
5. Check your rich snippets mark-up
If you use schema or data mark-up to create rich snippets, you can monitor these in Search Console. The Rich Results Testing Tool will indicate whether Google is reading your mark-up correctly. You can also demote specific pages from appearing as sitelinks in search engine results pages (SERPs) to ensure the most relevant pages are displayed.
6. Health check
Google Search Console produces reports on the health of your site including crawl errors. It will even suggest what might be preventing the Googlebots from crawling the page, highlighting potential issues with your website.
7. Temporarily Remove pages from Google search results
If you need to urgently remove a page from Google search results you can let Google know via Search Console. Webmaster guidelines suggest this should only be used in an emergency. Successful requests will last around six months. For a more permanent solution, you should be looking at implementing noindex tags on your website.
8. See who’s linking to your site
Search Console can provide a snapshot of both the internal and external links to pages on your site as well as the top linking sites and top linking anchor text. For each detected link, the page it comes from and goes to is displayed. Although Google doesn’t provide the most comprehensive list, it provides a valuable insight into the links it is indexing for your site. For a more comprehensive analysis of sites linking to you, it’s useful to get data from a range of sources. Such as the data provided by Majestic SEO, Ahrefs and on the Moz Open Site Explorer Tool.
9. Disavow links
In order to try and combat link spam (links acquired by means that infringe Google’s quality guidelines. Google have introduced a disavow links tool to be used (with caution) if you have been notified via GWT of “unnatural” linking to your website. When you get this message you are advised to try to remove as many ‘suspicious’ links to your website as you can by contacting the websites directly. When you have exhausted this root the Disavow Links Tool can help tidy up the remaining spammy links. Google provides some helpful advice on disavowing links, if you’d like more information..
10. Monitor performance
Using Search Console, you can view which search queries are generating clicks and impressions for your site, and analyse how this has changed over time. Website owners can compare this with their keyword strategy to ensure their site is correctly optimised for important search terms.
11. Analyse User Experience
Search Console provides valuable insight into user experience. This includes checking your pages pass core web vitals tests and is usable on mobile devices. Website owners can utilise Search Console to check page speeds as well as general utility to improve the user journey.
12.Share with other users
Webmasters can allow other users to view the Search Console Property for their site, allowing different levels of access depending on their role. This is ideal if you are working with a third party SEO expert or digital marketing agency.
Get Support With Search Console
Besides the tools provided by Search Console, there is also a comprehensive help area related to using Search Console and access to the ‘Webmaster Guidelines’ that lay out the rules that will keep your site on the right side of Google. For more help and support, get in touch with Bespoke digital – our team would be happy to help!
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