What Is Google Search Console?

Date First Published: 13th December 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Services

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what Google Search Console is in this article.

Google Search Console is a free web service provided by Google that allows website owners to monitor the presence of their website in the Google search results. Website owners do not have to sign up to Google Search Console to get their site indexed by Google and whether a site uses Google Search Console is not a ranking factor, but it is a useful service for website owners to access exclusive information about how their website is performing in the Google search results.

In addition to the below features of Google Search Console, website owners can also upload link disavow reports, resolve manual actions and security issues, all of which contribute to a better Google search presence.

When first using Google Search Console, you will have to add your first property. You can then insert the website you want to add. If you choose the domain option, you only need to enter the domain name without any subdomains. This option keeps track of everything related to that domain name. With the URL prefix option, you have to add the right URL and it only keeps track of everything under a specific URL, so if your website uses https, you will have to insert 'https://' before the URL, not 'http://' as you won't get the right data.

Features Of Google Search Console

The features of Google Search Console include:

• Monitoring of indexing and crawling, including examples of URLs that Google has crawled and indexed.
• Submitting and checking a sitemap.
• List of links that Google has had difficulty crawling, including the error that Googlebot has received when trying to access the URLs.
• Checking any security issues there are with the website.
• Checking any manual actions that Google has issued against the website.
• Viewing site speed reports from the Chrome User Experience Report.
• Viewing a list of internal and external pages that link to the website.
• Checking the crawl rate and viewing statistics about when Googlebot accesses the website.
• Overview of search engine performance, including which queries are causing the site to show up in the search results, the position the site is coming up, and the number of clicks, impressions, and organic click-through rate (CTR).
• URL inspection tool, showing whether a URL is indexed and if it is eligible to show up in Google search results.
• Receiving notifications from Google about penalties and problems with pages that cause them not to be crawled by Google.
• Support for writing and checking of a robots.txt file to help discover pages that are accidentally blocked in a robots.txt file.
• Mobile usability report, allowing website owners to see which pages are usable on mobile devices and which ones have issues as mobile usability is a minor Google ranking factor.

Verification

Before you can use Google Search Console, you must verify ownership of the site. This is because Google Search Console gives people access to confidential information about the performance of a website and allows you to adjust how Google crawls a website. The following verification methods can be used, which include:

• HTML file upload - Website owners upload a verification HTML file to a specific location of their websites.
• Domain name provider - Website owners sign into their domain name registrar and verify their sites by adding a DNS TXT or CNAME record.
• Meta tag - Website owners add a meta tag to the head section of the HTML code of a certain page.
• Google Analytics tracking code - Website owners can open Google Search Console using the same Google account that has edit access to the Google Analytics property to verify their property if the analytics code is detected on their website.
• Google Tag Manager - Website owners can copy the GTM container snippet code associated with their websites. They will need to have view, edit, and manage container-level permissions in Google Tag Manager for this verification option.

Note:

Google-hosted sites, such as Blogger and Google Sites pages are automatically verified.

Role Types

Role types determine the level of access and control someone has over the Google Search Console properties. There are two Google Search Console role types, which include:

• Owner - They have full control over their Google Search Console properties. They can access every tool, add and remove other users, adjust the settings, and see all data. A verified owner has completed the verification process whilst a delegated owner has been added by a verified one and hasn’t completed the verification process.
• User - They can view all data and perform some actions, but they cannot grant permission to other users. Full users can perform some actions, whilst restricted users can only view some data.

It is important to be careful of who has access and permission to adjust settings and not give anyone more permissions than they need. Giving everyone full ownership could lead to problems as they might accidentally change important settings.

History

Google Search Console was originally called Google Webmaster Tools before 20th May 2015. Google Webmaster Tools was released in the early 2000s. In January 2018, Google introduced a new version of the search console with changes to the user interface. In September 2019, the old search console reports were removed and are no longer available.

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