Google Search Console is a free service for Google Webmasters. It allows web page creators to check the indexing status of their sites on the internet by the search engine and to optimize their visibility. This Google service has the following tools for Webmasters:
- Submit and check a sitemap.
- Check and adjust the indexing frequency, and see how often Googlebot visits a certain site.
- Produce and check a robots.txt file.
- List the links from internal and external pages to that site.
- See what keywords in Google searches have led to that site and the click-through rate on the words in that list.
- View statistics on how Google indexes the site and the errors it may have found.
Search Console benefits
In addition, it is possible to link this Google tool with Google Analytics to measure the website’s statistics in a better and unified way. The “Performance” report shows important metrics about how your site is performing in Google Search results. How often the average position appears in search results, click-through rate, and any special features associated with your results. With this information, we can improve the performance of our site in the results in several ways. Therefore, as we mentioned, the use of this tool allows you to: See how search traffic is changing, where it’s coming from, and which search queries your site is most likely to show up with. Find out what queries are made on smartphones and take advantage of the information to improve your segmentation by mobile device. Find out which pages have the highest and lowest click-through rates in Google search results.
New performance report
This new report replaces the old search analytics report from the previous version of Search Console, Search Analytics. It contains all the information you need about the behavior of your website in Google search results. The main improvement of this version is that now the period that you can analyze has been extended to 16 months instead of 3. Thus, in addition to having more information, you can compare the seasonal results that are produced year by year.
Google News in the Search Console tool
Google News is an automated news aggregator and search engine that constantly tracks and updates every 15 minutes. It informs us of the main online communication media in different countries depending on the established configuration. On January 12, Google made the following statement: “Today we released a new Search Console performance report to help news publishers better understand user behavior on Google News. This new report shows clicks, impressions, and CTRs on Google News apps for Android and Android apps. iOS, as well as for the news.google.com website ”
The new performance report in Google News is available to all news publishers within Search Console. This will allow you to measure the performance of this type of content more precisely. Previously, it was only possible to verify the performance of Google News within the report in Google Search by choosing the performance report and selecting “News” as content. But that data did not offer direct information on the metrics of the Google News site, or its apps. Now we can find a much more detailed data report within Search Console.
Access the performance report in Google News
Access is as simple as clicking Google News in the performance section. The performance report will help us find answers to questions like …
- How many times have my articles been shown to users on Google News?
- What articles did well on Google News?
- How does user behavior vary by country?
The report will be very similar to others that we will find in Search Console, you can also segment data such as traffic by page, country, device and data. In the same way, we can filter the reports by date range, among other metrics. According to Google, this data will be supplemented by the other Search Console reports, in Search, Discover, and the News tab within the report in Google Search.
If you don’t see the report on Google News for now, don’t worry, it will be implemented gradually over the next few days for all users.
Coverage report update
Google announced that it had also made substantial updates to the coverage report on Google Search Console. The coverage report shows the indexing status of all the URLs that Google visited or tried to visit on your property. And it has added more index coverage statuses.
This would be the list of changes made:
- Elimination of generic tracking errors. All crawl errors will now display the detected error with a more detailed resolution.
- Pages submitted but blocked by robots.txt and indexed will now be reported as “indexed but blocked” instead of “submitted but blocked”
- A new problem “indexed without content” is added
- The 404 error status report will now include much more accurate information.
The changes are already being applied to all Search Console users and will be reflected in the coming days.