Google Webmaster Tool is a free service offered by Google that is used to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot the presence of your site in Google Search results. Search Console helps you to understand and improve how your site is viewed by Google.
Importance of Google Webmaster Tool
- It confirms that Google can find and crawl your site
- Fix the problems related to indexing of your website and helps in re-indexing of new and updated content-
- on your site.
- Can view Google Search traffic data for your site that is, how often your site appears in Google Search, which searches queries display your site, and how often your site is clicked on.
- Helps to receive alerts when Google encounters indexing, spam, or other issues on your website
- Shows which sites link to your website.
- Troubleshoots issues regarding AMP, mobile usability, and other search functions.
How to create account and index website on Search Console?
1. Go to Google.com and search for Google Search Console. After this page appears to click on “Start Now”
2.After signing in, you will be able to see this page
3. In this step, you have to select whether you want to Index your whole Domain or a Webpage. In this case, we are Indexing a web page so we will select “URL Prefix”.
4. Once you get this page, Click on URL or search bar and paste the URL of the website or webpage you want to get indexed.
5. After you have put the URL in the box above it will show that the URL is not on Google. Select the “REQUEST INDEXING” option to index your website.
6 Once you click on request indexing option , you will see a pop up displaying that your URL is a added to a priority queue.
It can take 5 minutes to 24 hours to index your website by Search Engine.
Conclusion:- This is how you can create your account on search console and get your website indexed in a few hours.
Coverage issues in Google Webmaster tool
Google Webmaster tool provides information about search console coverage issues i.e which page of the website is indexed by webmaster tool and which are not due to some errors. Coverage issues Reports shows the status of URL of your website
Error Report -It shows which pages are not indexed by Google due to 404 Error
Valid with warnings- It shows the page in indexed by Google but has some problems
Valid – It means the page has no issues and it is indexed by Google.
Excluded– It means the page is excluded by the search engine and it has not been indexed. There can be many reasons for this such as canonical tags, non-index command,
How to Find Coverage Issues in Search Console
Go to Search Console and on the left side, you will find coverage option click on it.
You will see a page displaying coverage report which shows what type of URL error is present in your website
Conclusion – This is how you can check coverage issues in Search Console.
How to remove 404 URL issues from the Google Webmaster tool or Search console?
It is very important to remove 404 URL errors from the website. The URL removal tool is important. One can fix or remove a 404 error through the search console. Google webmaster tool will remove the broken URL from displaying in search engine results page.
Note :- Search console temporarily remove URL from search results. After 90 days it will try to cache those pages. So, its important to blocked those URL through robots.txt command.
Steps to remove 404 or broken Url from Webmaster Tool
(1) Go to Search console and click on on Removal options
(2) Click on New Request Option
(3) After Clicking on Removals Tab, the Page will look like this and you can select the URL that you wish to remove from the category tabs.
Click on New Request to request the removal of the URL.
(4) After Clicking on New Request you can remove the URL from the list that is no longer required so that it is also removed from the Google Search Results.
Conclusion – This is how you can remove 404 URL errors from Search Console.
How to submit a sitemap in Search console?
Sitemap is a list web-pages of a website.It is important for easy navigation and indexing of all web-pages of website in one go.
Go to search console and click on Sitemaps and add the URL that you want to add to your website.
Conclusion – This is how you can submit sitemap in search console.