Definition:
Google Search Console (GSC), formerly known as Webmaster Central and later as Google Webmaster tools, is a collection of tools and resources to help website owners, webmasters, web marketers, and web professionals. SEO to monitor the performance in the Google search index of the sites. Features include information about search appearance, search traffic, technical status updates, crawl data, and additional educational resources.
Table of Contents
What is Google Search Console for?
Google Search Console is a free service provided by Google to manage the search functionality of a website. The search console is a collection of reports and tools that help to rectify errors, as well as make a strategy and optimize their positioning in search engines.
Google Search Console features
Some of the features offered by Google Search Console are:
- Submit and check a sitemap.
- Check and adjust crawl frequency and view statistics about Googlebot when accessing a particular site.
- Writing and checking a robots file.txt to help discover pages that are blocked in the robots file.txt accidentally.
- Make a list of internal and external pages that link to the site.
- Get a list of links that Googlebot has struggled to crawl with, including the error Googlebot receives when accessing the URLs in question.
- Set a preferred domain, which determines how the site URL is displayed in the SERPs.
- Provide access to an API to add, modify, and remove ads and errors from the crawl list.
How to use Google Search Console
Getting started with this free Google tool is very simple and intuitive. It is enough to identify yourself as a Gmail user (or make an account if you do not have one), add the website that you want to monitor and verify the ownership of that site by placing on the page the downloadable HTML file that they provide you. From there, you just have to configure the preferences and you can start collecting data from the website.
To facilitate the indexing and crawling of the pages in order to be able to start working on the positioning from the first minute, it is essential to send the sitemap of the web to Google. If you work with WordPress the operation can be done easily with Yoast SEO or Google XML sitemap.
Finally, it is recommended that Google Search Console be linked from the beginning with Analytics so that the monitoring is complete.
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