Webmaster Tools has been rebranded as Google Search Console
Google’s Webmaster Tools was has been running for nearly 10 years, providing users with handy tools and useful metrics on their websites.
But Google wants to expand the meaning of the term ‘webmaster’ to reflect other non-traditional webmaster tools users by including the broader range of users; incl: SEO experts, app developers, website designers, small business owners and webmasters too, hence the change to Search Console.
You may have already come across in Google Searches the promotional banner ad for signing up to Try Google Webmaster Tools (see image). As the roll out for the new rebranded Google Search Console goes out, this promotion is likely to be updated.
The rebranding is hoped to help non-webmasters using Google Search engines to find the Search Console and not to be intimidated by the name and thus for more users to sign up and use the service.
Webmaster tools or Google Search Console as it is now referred has many tools including the ability to ‘Fetch as Google’ a whole website or specific pages to see how Google Bots views the URLs and to Submit them to Google for recrawling. This is a great benefit when you are updating a website and want the Bots to find the changes faster. You can also see Errors the Bots may come across when rendering the site. There is a convenient HTML improvements section which advises on URLs meta titles and meta descriptions; are they too long, too short or duplicates on multiple pages. Submitting your website’s sitemap/s is also key to helping Bots crawl the website. Demotion of Organic sitelinks presented in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for detected URLs such as Contact form confirmation or log out pages for example; Search Console is the Google product tool employ.
Contact us to discuss setting your website up on Search Console