Google Webmaster Tools - An Overview

Google Webmaster Tools /Search Console

Google Webmaster Tools is a free service that helps you evaluate and maintain your website's performance in search results (1). Offered as a free service to anyone who owns a website,Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is a conduit of information from the largest search engine in the world to you, offering insights into how it sees your website and helping you uncover issues that need fixing.

You do not need to use GWT for your website to appear in search results, but it can offer you valuable information that can help with your marketing efforts.

Main Features of Google Search Console

• Submit and check a sitemap and also helps the webmasters to check if there are any errors with their sitemap.
• Check and set the crawl rate, and view statistics about when Google bot accesses a particular site.
• Write and check a robots.txt file to help discover pages that are blocked in robots.txt accidentally.
• List internal and external pages that link to the site.
• Get a list of links which Google bot had difficulty crawling, including the error that Google bot received when accessing the URLs in question.
• See what keyword searches on Google led to the site being listed in the SERPs, and the click through rates of such listings.
• Set a preferred domain (e.g. prefer example.com over www.example.com or vice versa), which determines how the site URL is displayed in SERPs.
• Highlight to Google Search elements of structured data which are used to enrich search hit entries (released in December 2012 as Google Data Highlighter).
• Demote Sitelinks for certain search results.
• Receive notifications from Google for manual penalties.
• Provide access to an API to add, change and delete listings and list crawl errors.
• Rich Cards a new section added, for better mobile user experience.
• Check the security issues if there are any with the website. (Hacked Site or Malware Attacks)
• Add or remove the property owners and associates of the web property.
  

How Search Console can help monitor your website's performance

1. It verifies that Google can access the content on your website.

2. GWT makes it possible to submit new pages and posts for Google to crawl and remove content you don't want search engine users to discover.

3. It helps you deliver and evaluate content that offers users a more visual experience.

4. You can maintain your website without disrupting its presence in search results.

5. It allows you to discover and eliminate malware or spam problems that may not be easily found through other means.

How Webmaster Tools helps you understand how Google search views your website

1. It tells you the most popular queries causing your website to appear in search results.

2. It tells you which queries are driving the most traffic.

3. You can see which websites are linking to yours.

4. You can evaluate how well your mobile website is performing for people searching on tablets and phones.

Verifying the Website using Webmaster Tools

1.Search for google.com/webmaster/tool

2.From the Home screen appearing, click on Add a Property.

3.Copy the URL which you want to fetch and paste it in the text field appearing and click the add button.

4.From the left panel select Crawl option, from that select Fetch as Google. Here we are requesting Google to Fetch our page.

5. In the above step, we asked Google to fetch the base URL.  Similarly to fetch a post we need to copy rest of the URL and paste it into the text field next to the base URL and click Fetch.

Hope you have got an outline of Global Webmaster Tools. You can also view my last posts on On Page Optimization and SEO History&Evolution.

Tinty Padmakumar