Search Console - Used to be Google Web Master Tools

For the more techy minded of you, you may have heard of webmaster tools, recently renamed search console, this is a very useful and free resource provided by Google that further ensures you are doing the right thing in Googles’ eyes, as such we know all about it and get you set up the right way and to guide you in using the information it provides to maximise your efforts

Subject: Google Tools

Category: Domain

Date: May 2018

Search Console - What does it do?

Indexing

Indexing can often be mixed up with ranking, they are very closely related but they are not the same thing, indexing simply means when Google recognises that you have a web page and it officially gives it a position within its database. We often have customers saying people can’t even find they’re website when they put it into to google this most likely because it is not indexed, search console allows us to this very quickly and simply.

Sitemaps

Search console is also the place where we submit our sitemap to Google. For now, all you need to know is that a sitemap is as it sounds, it is a digital file that maps out your website pages so that Google has a ‘map’ to navigate when it comes to crawling your website.

Watch out for 'SEO Shysters' !

Some unscrupulous SEO firms are charging businesses to get them to appear at the top of Google for their own domain name, this is NOT worth paying for, so don’t fall for it, we will happily show you how to do this for free whether you want us to take on your SEO or not. We are seeing this a lot and we feel it is unethical to charge clients for such a simple task.

Penalties

Don’t worry this not common but Google does penalize websites if they feel they that they are behaving outside of their terms of service, this can happen if you use an inexperienced SEO’er, search console allows us to see if there is an existing penalty and/or a likelihood or one appearing soon.