I want to talk about the new Google search console. We’ve had access to it for half a year or more, and I’ve played around with it on one or two sites. Google has now said it is going to be made available for everyone. If you’ve got a copy of the new search console function, go and have a look at the index coverage report. I won’t go into a review of the entire tool, but this portion deserves some notice.
One of the most important things, and one of the most difficult to do, is to clean up your index. It can be hard getting rid of all the little things that just shouldn’t be there. Google already gives us multiple tools to help us do this, but this one will not only help to clean up indexes faster than before, but it will show you where Google is spending too much time it shouldn’t. Sure, you can dig all that info out of a log report, but it’s much more convenient to have it all handy in one place.
The bottom line is this tool will help you to dig out potential issues that Google might find with your site. Now, Google might pick up on these items as issues, but if you’ve got 10 different versions of your terms and conditions page, you might not want Google crawling all over them. This new console will help you to find and take care of a whole raft of details like this.
Since Google Search Console is one of my most frequently used tools, I’m really looking forward to this upgrade. It’s going to be an awesome one.
This article was originally published on stewartmedia.com.au.
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Jim Stewart is a leading expert in search engine optimisation. His business StewArt Media has worked with clients including Mars, M2 and the City of Melbourne.
