In this article, we will look at the New Google Search console and explore what changes have been made, what we have gained, and what we are still missing.
The New google search console contains
- New visual design
- 5 times more historical data
- Improved reports
- New reports
Google search what?
Google search console is an essential set of tools and reports to help you measure and improve your search engine results. The search console used to be branded as googles webmaster tools and has kept the same design until recently. The visual appearance of the new tool is greatly improved, the updated design allows the menu to be fully displayed for easier navigation. but let’s face it – sleek appearance is not really important – we want the data…
What has changed
The New Search Console has a number of improvements over the previous version, firstly and probably the reason for the change is that it now works a lot better on mobile devices, and is brought into line with google’s new mobile usability index.
One of the more noticeable changes apart from the visual appearance is that we now get access to over 5 times more traffic data. That makes it 16 months of data, which enables you to spot trends more easily as well as dig deeper into performance issues. This can be found in the new version of the ‘Search Analytics report’, which is now more simply named ‘Performance’.
The ‘index status’ report also enjoys a revamp. It is renamed as ‘Index coverage status’ and contains all the information from the previous report plus detailed crawl status information.
‘Fetch as google’ has been renamed as the ‘URL inspection tool’ and shows details of both the indexed and live versions of a URL and you can request Google to crawl a URL from within the tool. The report now allows you to see if the URL is in the Google index the canonical page URL and any noindex/nocrawl blocks.