I have long wanted to write about this tool, but because put off a lot of work. Although this is the most important tool for optimizing the site, and not only for Google, but in general.
With it, you can see how bots see your site, partially backs (this is bad), which words are defined, etc. ... But more on that. So..
1. Adding a site to GWT.
If you already have an account with Google (any: mail, adsense or adwords, optimizer, analyst, it doesn’t matter), just follow the link for Webmaster Tools.
One caveat, if you have not used this tool before, it may not be, you need to add at least one site so that the link gets to your account page. Search or simply follow the link:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Click the button, add the site, and confirm the rules in any of the ways. Personally, I prefer downloading files, as I don’t feel like going into the DNS, and inserting an extra line into the page code is not a hassle. It is important to remember that adding a site, the system periodically rechecks the rights, so do not delete the file (code).
2. Site configuration.
- SiteMap files.
Here, you indicate the path to your site map in xml format. Everything is simple and clear here, they generated a map, uploaded to ftp, pointed the way to it. In addition, some sites generate maps automatically (for example, through feed), Google collects it yourself. Much has been written about the site map; read for yourself.
-Access to scan.
A very convenient tool, I often use it. It analyzes your robots.txt, helps generate it if necessary and, most importantly, remove unnecessary pages! The fact is that often, Google indexes closed pages and folders. Of course, they fall out over time, but it can take months. I prefer to delete unwanted pages manually. This is pretty easy to do:
We went to the section Remove URL, Created a deletion request, added pages here and wait ...
Usually removed within 24 hours. You can easily check the status through the request site: url
The deleted page can be returned back if accidentally added.
Important: to delete a page, it must give 404 errors, 301 redirects or be forbidden to be through robox. In general, you can’t delete a good page
- Website links.
If you have a fairly large portal, then you will be given the opportunity to make beauty in your search, such as:
I’ll draw your attention to the fact that Google itself determines which site, page and what to show there. You can just close the page / section. But to add - no
- Change of address.
This tool is needed if you are transferring a site from one domain to another. To do this, you need to configure 301 redirects from the old domain to the new one, and, in fact, this is enough. All search bots will replace the data. However, to speed up and so that there are no errors, in the webmaster panel you can manually specify from which site to redirect users to. This will significantly speed up the move and reindexing. To do this, both sites must be added to the same Google account.
- Settings.
In this section you can set which site is the main (with or without www, similar to Yandex HOST).
Scan rate- also a useful feature. Here you can configure the number of Google calls to the site. In general, in 95% of cases, it is better to leave the recommended, but sometimes you can change it. If you have a slow hosting, you can increase the frequency. If you have high loads, then on the contrary - reduce it so that there are not so many requests.
Parameter Processing. Another useful tool (especially for online stores). Often sites have some kind of operational parameters, such as ID, SID or something else.
You can force or deny separate variables (useful, for example, when sorting variables are given, or when turning pages). Most of Google’s parameters are determined by himself and prompted, but you can enter what you need yourself.
3. Section Your Website on the Internet.
- Search terms.
Very interesting thing. On this page you are given information on keywords in the search, impressions and clicks to your site. It indicates which position and on which particular page. The data is interesting for analytics and further advancement (I looked, for example, on what phrases you are on page 2 and you need to press it to get to the first).
In general, the thing is good, but in my opinion, it works very poorly, and the click data shows completely unrealistic (at least when compared with the same analyst). I hope these are temporary inconveniences and will work stably and clearly over time.
- Links to your site.
This is the data on backlinks to your site. Here you can look at which page who links, the number, and it is important - with what words (anchors). There is one BUT: these data are far from complete. Moreover, not even the most relevant. It is very difficult to determine some kind of connection; therefore, it is not possible to use these data for a really complete analysis. And, unlike the previous one, it was done by Google consciously!
- Keywords.
On this page in descending order are shown the words that the search bot found on your site. Look at them carefully, if there is something off topic, look for a reason. Thematic words should be higher than non-thematic. Another aspect - these words can be used to compose key phrases that you plan to advance on. Only one-word phrases are given here. Use them to select more specific 2 and 3-complex phrases.
- Internal links.
This report shows you your internal linking: i.e. which pages of your site link to this. Convenient to study the distribution of weight. Having studied this report, it immediately becomes clear which pages are most weighty.
- Statistics about subscribers.
Convenient function for statistics, for example on FEEDs. Or ref links. Although, to be honest, I did not particularly use or study this function. Read in more detail:
4. Block Diagnostics.
- Malicious programs.
If your site has been hacked, atm some harmful script, worm, virus or some other nasty thing - Google will notice it, mark it in the results of the search as dangerous and let you know. In this section. After you correct the error, you can send the site for review. It will take about 3-4 days ... It happens a week. But the Search Engine will scan your site and if everything is fine, it will remove this inscription. I advise you to look here.
- Scan errors.
This page displays pages that for one reason or another the bot could not index (there is no page, or it is closed in the robot). Why might this be useful? Firstly, you could accidentally close the necessary blocks. Secondly, the page addresses could change, and there are links (both external and internal) that link to a non-existent page. The report is broken down by error type: not found, closed in robots.txt, or error 404. Here you can track errors and fix them.
- Scan statistics.
Here you can find information in graphs on 3 indicators: the number of scanned pages per day (the more the better), the number of kilobytes downloaded per day (the more the better) and the time for loading 1 page in milliseconds (the less the better). Schedule for the last 90 days. Basically characterizes the speed of your hosting, whether there were failures. Well and the site’s weight, of course. Minimum, maximum and average indicators are given. If the spread is too large, then hosting is unstable .... Or dvizhek- also happens. You cannot control the speed itself; Google determines what your site is and how many pages per day you need to crawl. There are only statistics.
- HTML suggestions.
One of the most important, from my point of view, functions.
On this page, Google shows that he recommends doing to improve your site. Recall: each page should have its own unique Title and Description, and not very short and not very long (and should contain keywords).
What's convenient - this tool shows such error pages. This feature is great for finding hidden takes. For example, the same page has multiple addresses. Of course, she has the same meta tags. You found it here, closed it from indexing, deleted it from the index. The site received + for quality. I regularly come here.
5. Experimental functions.
- See how Googlebot.
Here you are given the opportunity to look at your page through the eyes of a Googlebot. Just indicate the page that interests you, and in a couple of minutes get it in html. By the way, it helps a lot to search for the very viruses or hidden text or something else.
- Wikki's comments.
Interesting thing. You, as a site administrator, can leave a message to all users who will view WikiMessages on your sites. For example, set the text:
And on your site, when switching to comments, we see.
Greetings, dear blog readers!
As promised, today I will tell you about tools for webmasters: Yandex.Webmaster and Google Webmaster. I will describe their main features, how to use them when analyzing your blogging, how to register here and why this is mandatory.
Webmaster Tools
Let's start from the very beginning and in detail. As we know, Yandex and Google are two search engines that will bring us search traffic (which in the initial stages of blogging is the main traffic). That is why the more willingly we make contact with them, the more willingly they will move us upward in search results.
Therefore, the first thing to do is inform the search engines about the appearance of your site.
Then you need to confirm the rights to your site.
Further, it is necessary to indicate to these very PSs about their tools, with the help of which they can quickly and efficiently index your blog and enter pages in the database. Such tools are robots.txt and sitemap.xml files.
Well, after that, monitoring remains. I will introduce you to the basic tools for tracking positions, requests and more.
Well, let's start in order. First we’ll do everything on Yandex, then on Google’e.
First of all, register mailboxes in these services, if you have not done so already (you never know). If there is, log in.
New Yandex webmaster
Click "Add Site" at the top and enter the URL of our site. Click "add."
Here they will immediately ask you to confirm the rights to our site. You can do this in several ways and they are described in each tab: using the html file, meta tag, and more.
The easiest way is with a txt file. Click on the appropriate tab. Then create a text file on the computer and give it the name indicated on the page. Next, upload this file to the root httpdocs folder of your site. On mchost hosting, this is done as follows: go to the file manager of your site, click "Upload file." Select our text file and click "Download."
First, upload the robots.txt and sitemap files here. If you are familiar with the sitemap from the previous article, you may not have the robots.txt file. It is created as follows: also on the computer, make a text document and give it the name strictly robots.txt
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: / wp-includes
Disallow: / wp-feed
Disallow: / wp-content / plugins
Disallow: / wp-content / cache
Disallow: / wp-content / themes
Host: * your site WITHOUT http: // and other characters *
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: / wp-content / uploads /
User-agent: YandexImages
Allow: / wp-content / uploads /
Note: in the line “host” we simply enter the site address without extra characters and other things, for example: a site. In the sitemap line, we already enter the full link to your site map. If you use the plugin, go to the admin menu in the SEO - XML \u200b\u200bsitemap menu and click on the XML Sitemap button.
Your site map will open for you, from here you take the link from the address bar and paste it into the Sitemap bar.
Save the file and upload it there in the root folder of the blog. Now we go to Yandex.webmaster, in the menu on the left “Indexing settings” - “Robots.txt analysis”. Here we click "Download robots.txt from the site", and then "Check." All robots added, there should be no errors.
Now click on “Sitemaps”. Here it’s also simple: we indicate the link to the site map, click “check”, and if there are no errors, click “add” (if there are no articles or pages on the blog, Yandex may see some errors, do not worry, when adding articles they disappear). The file will be put into processing.
In principle, the most basic thing in Yandex.Webmaster we did. I highly recommend you visit here more often. After indexing, the “General Information” section will display data on the number of pages in the Yandex database, pages in search, links to pages, and more.
In the "Site Indexing" menu there will be more detailed information about your site, and more precisely about how Yandex sees it.
In the menu "Search Queries" will be displayed queries by which visitors go to the pages of the site from the search. Study and analyze this information, draw conclusions.
Original Yandex texts
There is also a useful service “Original Texts” in the “Site Content” menu.
With it, you can notify Yandex that you are registering a certain text on your site (for example, the text of an article), and if this text appears somewhere later, it means it is stolen from you. Be sure to add the texts of your articles here before publishing it on your blog!
I think Yandex can be completed, go to Google.
Google webmaster
In principle, this is the same and there are few differences. Click the red button "add property", enter the site.
This is confirmed even easier:
Download the proposed file, throw it in the root folder. Click confirmation.
The same story with Sitemap - go to "Sitemaps" and add your map here.
There are also a lot of monitoring tools. In the "Messages" menu you will receive various alerts about your site. DO NOT IGNORE THEM! These can be very important points!
In the menu "Search traffic" you can see your data on search queries in the same way as Yandex. And in the menu "View in search" - data on page layout.
However, all this will come with time. If you are a beginner blogger and just created your own resource, registering and adding files to Yandex.Webmaster and Google Webmasters tools will be enough.
Also, I advise you to perform similar operations in the mail.ru tools, here is the link - http://webmaster.mail.ru/
That’s all for me. Make your blogs and take part in our competition.
Tools for webmasters from Google provide some very interesting features that are needed in the optimizer. In this article, how to see how many times a keyword appears on your site and on which pages, how to simply structured markup, which will help to make up the core for an existing site, how to look at errors in meta tags and indexing. If something is missing, I ask for comments, comrades.
Home page
Top right corner. reference - there is a lot of information from Google for webmasters. Settings - You can set up email alerts and their language. Add site - No comments.
Left menu. All posts - Messages from Google regarding your sites added to Webmaster. Other resources - there are many tools:
- Structured Data Validation Tool - validates micro-markup (schema.org). A separate article is needed about micro-marking, for now I’ll just say that it is important in certain topics.
- The structured data markup wizard is a very cool tool where you can drop a page and mark it with micro-markup, just selecting objects on it (then, of course, you have to go into the code, but you will already be moving in the right direction).
- A tool for checking the markup in letters - this is if you are engaged in email marketing and make beautiful letters to the client base. In this case, you can check the validity of their markup.
- Google Places is like Yandex Directory, you can say. Here you will need to add information about the organization.
- Google Merchant Center - this section is needed if you are selling something on your website, here you can find information about the store and products.
- PageSpeed \u200b\u200bInsights is one of the best site speed checking services that provides fairly comprehensive information.
- Custom search - here you can add a search engine from Google to your website.
This is about a common interface. When we select a site, we have a lot more opportunities.
Choose a site
From the main page, we can immediately go to site messages, crawl errors, search queries and Sitemaps. We will mention all of this below. 
Additional features appear at the “ Settings». 
- Tool settings for webmasters - here we can configure receiving emails from Google for any problem, I advise.
- Site settings - here you can configure the main domain (with www or without www), as well as limit the frequency of site scanning (if Googlebot requests slow down the server). Only to choose the main domain, you will have to confirm the rights to both.
- Change of address - this is when moving the site to a new domain.
- Google Analytics Resource - Binds Analytics to the Webmaster. I recommend setting it up right away if Analytics is installed on your site, as this will help you see statistics on requests that would otherwise be listed as not provided.
- Users and site owners - here you can share access to the Webmaster panel to other persons with full or limited access.
- Verification information - nothing interesting, how the owners were verified and who they are.
- Connected users - there was a link to Google+, but this network turned out to be untenable and the shop was slowly minimized, but this item remained in the settings.
Next, go to the left menu. With paragraph " Site Posts»We are already familiar, only here - exclusively related to the selected site messages. 
View in search.
The first item here is “ Structured data”Which we are fed up with during the review. If you didn’t bother with micro markup, you will see a bunch of errors here.
Marker - Similar to the Structured Data Markup Wizard. In fact, it selects objects according to the same principle.
HTML optimization - a useful point, it will indicate errors with indexing and meta tags. Here you can find duplicate pages (with the same headings or meta descriptions)
Site links - referring to those that are like "quick links" in the issuance of Yandex. If you are automatically affixed with such “quick links” that you would not want to see there, you can remove them from there by lowering their rating here.
Search traffic.
Here the first item is “ Search queries". Perhaps one of the most basic in Google Webmaster. There are two tabs - Popular Queries and Popular Pages. In both cases, we see a convenient diagram with the ratio of impressions and clicks for all requests / pages for a certain date range. 
In the first case, under the diagram, we see a list of queries that showed your site’s impressions on Google, with statistics. You can upload data to a csv or table, show the number of rows to display; choose whether to show only statistics or also data on its change for each request. By clicking on the column headings (Impressions, Clicks, etc.), you can sort them. By clicking on a request, you can see really detailed statistics on it. About the same thing is true for the “Popular Pages” tab, only with respect to pages, and when you click on the URLs, the queries for which they were displayed are displayed. In fact, based on these data, it is possible to compose a skeleton of a new semantic core and distribution file - they will help to break requests into pages. For a deeper analysis of queries, you can set filters.
Links to your site - No comments; I must say, Google Webmaster finds a lot more inbound links than a similar service from Yandex. Choose a domain from those that are “most often referred to”, there will be a list of pages to which links from this domain go. Click on the name of the page - there will be a link to the donor. Click Advanced to see a complete list of referring domains. On the right is a column on your acceptor pages - if that's more convenient to look at. Links to your data are anchors. You can upload them to Google spreadsheets (hieroglyphs are uploaded to CSV), sort them and see which anchors are too many.
Internal links - Well, here is infa, which of your pages has the most links on your site. You can sort, and by clicking on the page name, see from which pages the links to it go.
Manual measures - this is only if they fight against you, as with a spammer.
Country and Language Targeting - only if you set your language and geographic targeting. Then you will have to write down the hreflang attributes to indicate the available language versions of the site.
Convenience of viewing on mobile devices - indispensable for attracting mobile traffic. Shows error pages and describes these errors in detail.
Google index.
If we go to " Indexing Status“, There we will see the dynamics of the number of pages indexed by Google and the number of blocked through the robot.
Content Keywords - here we will see which keys are most often found on our site. And having clicked on a word, we will also find out in which word forms and on which pages (and even the exact number of references to the word on the site!).
Delete URLs - we delete the site page from Google’s issuance and regret that you can’t add competitor pages there.
Scanning.
First point - " Crawl errors"- allows you to detect pages that give the wrong response code or other errors.
Crawl statistics - Just information about how Googlebot walks around your site.
See how Googlebot - You can scan the page as a Google robot, see the load time and add the page to the index.
Robots.txt file validation tool - there is nothing unusual.
Sitemaps - reports on the problems and the correctness of the site map, also, in principle, everything is clear.
URL Parameters - You should climb here only if there are problems with crawling the site.
Security concerns - only if your site is infected or linked to other infected ones.
As you can see, there are a lot of powerful tools for promoting on Google, but even if the main goal is Yandex, you can find something useful here.
One of the important steps to increase the increase in traffic and conversion on your project is to add your site to Google Webmaster Tools.
Google Webmaster Tools is a set of tools that allow you to track how your site is perceived by the most popular search engine in the world of Google. Reports and data from Google Webmaster show you how various pages of content on your site appear in search results.
You can also track the search queries for which visitors come to your project, click map, place of failure, and in case of problems you will be immediately informed. Thanks to these data, you can improve your articles, choose the right direction and develop new strategies for the development of your project.
Register and add a site to Google Webmaster Tools
To start working with the Google Webmaster service, you need to have your own gmail.com inbox, for which, follow the link https://www.gmail.com
Using the username and password from the mailbox, go to Google Webmaster at the link https://www.google.com/webmasters/ under your Google account. After entering the system, click the "Add Resource" button.
In the next window, Google Webmaster will offer you to confirm the ownership of the project that you want to add to the search engine. There are several ways to check the ownership of a site, but I suggest using the recommended Google method, i.e. Place the HTML confirmation file in the root directory of your site using the FTP manager.
After placing the downloaded HTML confirmation file in the root directory of your site, go to the link http: //your_site/google_file.html in your browser. You will see a similar message.
After successfully loading the HTML file, click on the "Verify" button below.
Do not delete the HTML confirmation file even after the procedure is completed, otherwise the confirmation may be canceled.
If you did everything correctly, your website will appear on the Google Webmaster Tools page.
Click the "Continue" button and the Search Console Toolbar window will open in front of you.
Do not worry if, after adding your site to the Google Search Console, information about the results of the project’s diagnostics will not immediately appear. If you see the message "No data" in the "Scan Errors" and "Search Query Analysis" sectors, return to the "Search Console" panel after a while. When the Google search engine starts crawling your resource more often, the information in the Search Console toolbar will be more detailed and will be updated regularly.
Adding a Sitemap sitemap and checking Robots.txt in Google Webmaster.
To better index our project on Google, you need to add a Sitemap sitemap. How to create sitemaps in Sitemap XML format for a project built on Joomla, see the article. The Sitemap informs Google and other search engines about how the data is organized on your site. Sitemaps also provide metadata to search engines about your pages: the date they were updated, how often they changed, and how important pages are compared to other URLs on your project. Search engines, including Googlebot, crawl this Sitemap in order to more accurately index the pages of your website.
To add a site map, go to the "Scan" - "Sitemap Files" item.
In the window that opens, click the "Add / Verify Sitemap" button.
In the window that appears, write down the address of your XML map without a website domain in the form of the text "sitemap.xml" or, if your project is built on the Joomla engine, write the text "index.php? Option \u003d com_xmap & view \u003d xml & tmpl \u003d component & id \u003d 1" (without quotes) .
First, check the sitemap by clicking on the "Check Sitemap" button.
If there are no problems in the Sitemap, then click the "Submit Sitemap" button.
After updating the page, the following window will open in front of you.
Here, in the Scan section, you can check the operability of the file you created robots.txt in the "Robots.txt File Validation Tool" tab. In the central part of the window, you will see the contents of your robots.txt file. Enter the text "robots.txt" in the bottom field of the window and click the "Check" button.
If everything is in order, the “Available” message will appear in place of the “Check” button, and “0” as well as errors and warnings.
Draw your attention! The site will appear in a Google search engine in a few days.
After a while, the Google search engine will index your website, after which you can see a report on the results of indexing your project in the toolbar.
Good luck in your endeavors! See you soon on the blog pages site
If these steps have already been completed, you can go directly to.
For all Google services associated with your site, it’s best to use one account. If the site already has the Google Analytics code installed or a representative office is created in Google My Business, it’s better to add the site to the Google Search Console from the same account. If you don’t have an account yet, create one.
After that, you can proceed to adding the site to the Google Search Console.
Click "Add Resource". In the window that appears, paste the site address by copying it from the address bar. At the same time, do not forget about the slash at the end (/), click the "Continue" button:
After that, the system will offer to confirm the rights to manage the site. You can confirm them both by the recommended method, and one of the alternative ones.
If you have access to the server, it is better to use the recommended method and upload a confirmation file to the site:
An important point!Google periodically checks the owner’s rights. Make sure that the data with which the confirmation was made remains available on the site.
Immediately add and confirm both versions of the site with www and without. Next I will explain why this is necessary.
After the management rights are confirmed, go to the toolbar of your site and open the settings tab.
How to properly configure the Google Search Console
In the upper right corner of the screen, click the gear:
In the screenshot, I highlighted the most important tabs. But let's go over everything.
Search Console Settings
Here you can specify whether you want to receive notifications by e-mail about problems on the site, and choose the language of messages. By default, notifications are already enabled, they will not come more often than once a month. This is a useful feature, so if we are satisfied with the default language, nothing is changed.
Site settings
This is an important setting, we definitely go here.
Here you can specify which mirror - with or without www - will be the main one. In most cases, search engines themselves correctly determine the mirror of the site, but it’s better not to risk it and make directions.
Conducting audits, we often faced a situation where Google and Yandex were defined as the main different site mirrors.
To specify the main mirror, you must add and confirm the rights to both versions, otherwise you cannot specify the main one. If you didn’t do this when adding the site, add a second mirror and confirm the rights:
The frequency of updates is left at the discretion of Google.
Change of address
You will need this tool in case of changing the site address, but now we are considering other tasks, so skip this tab.
Google Analytics Resource
Very important taboften forgotten. Here you can link the Google Search Console and Analytics. This will allow you to get more information about requests for which users find the site in organic search results. The reports in both tools, if linked, will be more complete.
If the data in Analytics and the Google Search Console are not yet connected, select them from the list and save the changes. A message should appear that the site and the resource are connected.
You can only make these settings if Analytics code has already been added to the site, I think this is obvious.
Users and resource owners
You need this tab to provide access to data for another account. For example, for employees of an SEO company where you plan to order promotion.
To do this, enter the address, indicate which access you provide: full or limited:
If you are not sure what kind of access to provide, click on the link “About full and limited access” to find out what possibilities will be in both cases.
Verification Information
This tab displays information on confirmation of rights to the site: which sites were confirmed, when confirmation was performed, in what way. You can go in to make sure that only you are listed as the owner.
If there are no problems with confirmation, you can not go here often.
Related users
Here you can link other Google properties (AdWords, Google+) or a mobile application to the Google Search Console. If you have such resources, and you continue to be engaged in their development, it is worth doing it.
Having finished with the settings block, we go to the main functionality, which is located in the left vertical menu.
Google Search Console Features
Messages
These are usually important messages about problems with the site or its availability. Going into the panel, be sure to check for new messages:
Search view
Structured data
This tab displays information about how Google handles the semantic markup used on the site, whether there are errors in the markup. If you do not use markup or, perhaps, do not know what it is, I definitely recommend that you understand this topic and place markup available for your content.
The most obvious plus of using markup is the improvement of snippets. By clicking on the “i” icon next to the phrase “View in search”, you can see what options for displaying advanced snippets on Google are:
Marker
This item also applies to markup. You can apply markup in the page code or use the Marker tool specially developed by Google employees. It allows you to implement markup without making changes to the site code. A great solution for small projects, when the owner does not have the opportunity to hire a programmer, or the time to understand the code.
The marker allows you to spend one evening marking yourself. All instructions for using the tool are on the same page.
The method is good, but less flexible. For commercial projects, it is better to use markup in the site code.
An important point.On the site, you can use either markup in the code or the Marker markup tool. You cannot use both methods.
HTML optimization
Very important tab.It is advisable to check it regularly (at least once a month) and eliminate the causes of errors if they occur.
Here you can see:
- are there any problems with the content of your descriptions and headings (title and description);
- whether there are problems on the site with the presence of internal takes or duplication of the title and meta description within the site.
Problems on the site may be related to the absence, length or descriptiveness of meta descriptions and headings. Website owners often ignore reports of these errors, believing that if they did everything well on promoted pages, then errors on others are not important. This is not true. A large number of pages with errors can reduce the assessment of the quality of the site and affect the ranking of the main queries.
If you see that errors related to the repetition of headings or meta descriptions are shown, this most likely means that the site has duplicate pages or data. In both cases, the error must be fixed.
The panel not only signals the presence of errors, but also shows the pages on which errors are detected.
In order to see this information, click on the link with an error message.
Sometimes owners of large projects get scared when they see that the tab displays thousands of pages containing errors. Correcting each page separately is usually not necessary. Most errors are typical, and are corrected after setting up automatic completion of the headers and describing or correcting the error due to which duplicates are in the index.
Using our site as an example, let’s show which links are in question.
Fast loading pages for mobile devices
The tab appeared in the panel only at the beginning of 2016 and is associated with the new technology for AMP mobile pages. Formal recommendations.
At the moment (February 2016) there is too little information about the experience of implementing AMP. Therefore, I do not recommend rushing and making your site a "guinea pig."
Search traffic
Search Query Analysis
The tab allows you to get basic information about search visibility and site traffic. In the Google Search Console, the emphasis, unlike Analytics, is on displaying the site in search results.
In the “Search Query Analysis” you will find: clicks, impressions, CTR, average position and, most importantly, the queries themselves. Let me remind you, in order to get more complete information, be sure to connect Analytics and the Google Search Console.
The toolkit, of course, is not as large as in Google Analytics, but there are basic opportunities for analysis.
Links continue to have a significant impact on Google rankings. This tab displays links to your site that Googlebot discovered. Usually not all links are displayed, but the list is quite large and can be uploaded for analysis if necessary.
In the tab you can see:
- total number of links;
- which sites and pages link to you;
- which pages of your site are linked to;
- what anchors (texts) the links have.
In this tab you can see how the internal links of the site are distributed. If most of the links lead to secondary pages, and important pages are closer to the end of the list, then this is an occasion to review the site structure.
The more links within a site lead to a page, the more important it is.
Manual measures
When analyzing a site, be sure to go to this tab. It displays messages about manual sanctions applied to the site.
Saw the message “No manual anti-spam measures were taken for this site.” - everything is good. If there are sanctions, there will be a message with a detailed explanation of what caused them.
Reasons why measures can be taken manually to the site:
- Hacked site
- User Created Spam
- Spam Free Hosting Services
- Structured Markup Spam
- Artificial links to your site
- Uninformative useless content
- Disguise and covert redirects
Country and Language Targeting
You need this tab if the site is oriented to different countries and / or languages.
It displays information on setting the hreflang attribute and indicates which country your site is currently linked to.
Convenience of viewing on mobile devices
Optimization of sites for mobile search has been one of the main topics of many recent reports and meetings with Google representatives. From words to deeds. You can evaluate how your site is adapted for mobile search in the Google Search Console panel:
Google index
Indexing Status
The tab displays information about the indexed pages of the site. Be sure to check this tab to make sure that everything is okay with indexing and there are no sharp failures.
A sharp increase in the number of pages in the index can also be an alarm. If during this period you did not add new pages to the site, then duplicates or service pages could get into the index.
Strive to ensure that the number of pages is stable, and even better - there has been a gradual increase.
Content Keywords
This tab contains the most important words found on the site according to the Google algorithm. The more often a word occurs, the more important it is.
In this list you can see if there are any irrelevant words among the frequently encountered words, whether the words from the main promoted phrases of the site are high enough in the list.
Important!In no case should you regard this tab as a call to spam keywords on all pages. Such direct impacts can degrade the quality of the content or even cause sanctions.
By clicking per word, you can see information on the used word forms and see a list of pages on which the word occurs. The page addresses will be especially useful - you can delete unwanted words or information.
Blocked Resources
The Google algorithm can understand and process CSS and JavaScript files. Moreover, he needs access to these files in order to properly scan the site. This tab displays files that Google recommends access to.
By going to the tab, in addition to the schedule, you will see a list of hosts, clicking on which you can see a list of resources for which access is not available.
Remove URLs
The tool helps speed up the removal of unwanted pages from Google search results.
Specify the URL you want to remove, and send a request for removal.
Important! Use this tool only if you are completely confident in your actions. In practice, we met with a situation where the owner, experimenting with this tool, completely deleted the site from the Google index. Since this was not the only experiment, finding the reason for the loss of all pages was not easy.
Scanning
Crawl errors
An important and useful tab that you need to regularly review.
This tab contains technical errors that Googlebot found while crawling your site. Separately displayed:
- errors of the whole site;
- URL errors.
URL errors are divided in turn by device type: PC, smartphone and regular phone.
As with most Google Search Console tabs, you can go to the error message and get more detailed information about the page where the error was found and its causes.
If you haven’t dealt with technical errors on the site before, their number can be quite large. Note:
1. A large number of errors does not mean that everything is bad with the site.Of course, you need to fix problems, but often this does not prevent the site from ranking high.
2. Search and eliminate the cause of errors first, and only then fix the errors themselves. For example, removing unnecessary pages from the index.
3. First of all, eliminate errors related to the main promoted pages.
4. It happens that the page due to which an error occurred is no longer on the site. Dealing with such errors can be problematic. Therefore, the best option in this case is to wait for the page information to be updated.
5. Often errors are associated with incorrect links from the site map.Make sure the information on your card is up to date.
Crawl statistics
The tab displays the statistics of scanning the entire site for the last 90 days. Information is collected on all documents of the site (pictures, styles, scripts, etc.), and not just on the pages.
Visible, but not very informative tab. If all the graphs on the chart are relatively stable (small spikes are acceptable), then there are probably no problems.
View as Googlebot
With this tool, you can see how your Googlebot page sees, see if all the page content is indexable. You can also change the type of Googlebot-a to analyze the display of the site on different devices.
This tool is actively used by webmasters, including to speed up page indexing. Perhaps this is why the number of requests is limited to 500 per week, and before sending the request you now need to confirm to Google that you are not a robot.
Robots.txt file validation tool
In this tab, you specify the robots.txt file of your site. And you can see if there are any errors in it. The indicated errors are not always significant. For example, in the screenshot I showed a common situation when the Clean-param directive became the cause of the error. Only Yandex supports it.
You can also check any site URL - is it closed for indexing or not.
To do this, add the page address in the "Enter URL" field and click "Check":
Sitemaps
In this tab, you can add a map or site maps. And if they are already added, then see if they have errors or warnings.
Also in this tab you can see the number of pages aimed at indexing and indexed pages:
URL Parameters
The tool allows you to tell Googlebot how to handle different parameters of the site URL. As with "Delete URLs," you should use the tool only if you are sure of what you are doing.
You will see the same warning in the tab itself:
Security concerns
A warning in this tab will appear if viruses or malware have been detected on the site. If there are no problems, you will see the following message:
“There are currently no security issues found on your site ...”
Search engines take security very seriously. Therefore, in case of problems, you will see a warning as soon as you enter the Google Search Console panel.
Other resources
Conclusion
The Google Search Console is a convenient and free tool that will not only be useful in troubleshooting, but will also help in optimizing the site.
It is important not just to make the necessary settings once and fix the errors displayed in the panel, but regularly - we recommend 1-2 times a month - check the information in the panel. This will allow you to timely identify errors on the site and correct them, to keep abreast of important innovations and requirements for the quality of the site.
Work with Android
