This section goes over the different functions of Google Search Console.
- Google Search Console: formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, is a free tool provided by Google that helps website owners, SEO specialists, and marketers understand how Google views their site and to optimize its performance in search results.
- Crawl: This is the process by which Google explores your website, reviews its content, and logs details about each page to be recalled later when needed.
- Crawl Errors: These are issues Google encountered while trying to crawl a site. They can be site-wide (related to DNS, server connectivity, or robots.txt) or URL-specific (like 404 errors).
- Index Coverage Report: This report shows which of your pages have been indexed, any issues preventing pages from being indexed, and gives troubleshooting tips to help you resolve those issues.
- Sitemap: A sitemap helps Google understand your site structure. In Google Search Console, you can submit a sitemap to help Google find important pages on your site that it might otherwise miss.
- URL Inspection Tool: A feature in Google Search Console that provides information about Google's indexed version of a specific page. It provides details like when the page was last crawled, its status, any crawl or indexing issues, and the canonical URL for the page.
- Robots.txt Tester: A tool in Google Search Console that checks whether your robots.txt file is working as expected. It allows you to identify and troubleshoot errors.
- Search Analytics / Performance Report: This report provides metrics about your site’s performance in Google Search results; such as which search queries show your site, how often search users click through for those queries, and how your results are ranking.
- Mobile Usability Report: This report shows you any issues affecting viewing your site on mobile devices. Given the importance of mobile browsing, it's crucial to fix usability errors to improve mobile rankings.
- Manual Actions: These are penalties or actions taken by Google's reviewers against a site that is trying to manipulate ranking in Google's search results. The Manual Actions page in Google Search Console lists any issues that Google has with your site.
- AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) Report: This feature helps you to fix technical errors with your AMP pages and tracks their performance in search results.
- Core Web Vitals: These are a set of metrics related to speed, responsiveness, and visual stability, to help site owners measure user experience on the web. Google Search Console provides a report for websites to see how they are doing on these vitals.
- Links Report: This report provides data about where your site links to and what internal and external pages link back to you. It's a useful tool for analyzing your site's backlink profile.
- Security and Manual Actions report: This section includes the Security Issues report, which gives you information about any identified security issues on your site, such as hacking and malware issues.
- International targeting: This feature in Google Search Console allows you to target a specific country audience with your website, which could help your website rank more prominently in country-specific Google search results.
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