How to Use Google Search Central (formerly Google Webmaster Tools)

Google Webmaster Tools are free tools which help to understand what is going on with your website in terms of search engine optimisation.

You need a Google account (Gmail, YouTube) to access the tools. Simply head over to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools and log in. You can see a list of your current websites from the Search Console. Google calls these properties. If you've not added any yet, the list will be empty.

Click the large "Add a property" button to get started. From here, enter the URL and click Add.

The next step is to verify that you are the owner. There are several ways you can do this. If you already use analytics, you can link the property to the Analytics property. You can also upload a file to the root of the domain, add a meta tag to the homepage's header or add a tag to the DNS record. Uploading the provided file is a good option.

Once you click Verify, Google Webmaster Tools will go away and verify your domain. Once that is complete, you can access the full Search Console and find out what is going on with your search engine optimisation.

The first thing you will see is a list of messages from Google about your site performance. If your site has any problems, for example, broken links, invalid sitemaps or connectivity errors, they will show here. Google may also email you a copy of these messages, depending on your settings. You can also see an overview of your site's performance, which includes sections covering crawl errors, search analytics, and sitemaps. Each summary box links to the main report for more detailed information.

If you're adding a brand new website, no information may be available yet. It sometimes takes a few days or a few weeks for data to show.

Let's look at each report, what information it gives us and why it is important.

Google Webmaster Tools Shows Crawl Errors

This section of the search console shows detailed information about any problems Googlebot encountered whilst crawling your site. This could be from broken links, server connectivity issues, or server errors.

The most important report in this section is the "Not Found" errors. These are also known as 404 errors. This report will show you the broken links on your site so you can fix them, either by repairing the link or redirecting the broken link to another page.

You can also see any server errors, such as server-side code or configuration errors. These should also be fixed as a high priority as often they can lead to internal implementation disclosure, which in turn leads to being hacked.

Clicking on any of the broken links will show the details of the error. It will show you how often the error occurred when it first occurred, and what pages and websites are linking to that page. You can also fetch the page as Googlebot and see what the search engine sees. This can help diagnose problematic 404 errors when the page does exist.

Once you have resolved an issue, you can mark it as fixed by clicking the tick box followed by "Mark as Fixed". Google will then go away and re-crawl those pages. Check back in a few days; it should no longer appear on the list.

Another report in the Crawl menu is the crawl stats. From here, you can see how many times Google tries to index your pages per day, how much bandwidth it is using, and how long it spends downloading content. Google is usually good and keeps the crawl rate low, but sometimes, it can hammer a site, especially if the server isn't very powerful. In these cases, you can throttle the crawl rate by clicking the gear icon in the top right and selecting "Site Settings". From here, you can choose the option to set the crawl rate manually.

Also within the crawl menu is a tool for testing your robots.txt file. This is especially useful if a particular page or section is not getting indexed in Google. The page will show you the contents of the robots.txt file as Google sees it. It will report any errors in the file and provide an option to test a URL. Enter a URL in the box provided and click test. This will then fetch the page as Googlebot and report if the page is blocked by robots.txt.

The final section of note in the Crawl menu is the sitemaps page. This report will give you an overview of your website's sitemap performance and detail the number of unique URLS submitted in the sitemap and the number of URLS currently in Google's index. If there are any errors in the sitemap, they will also be listed here. If you don't have a sitemap, you can submit one to test or for inclusion.

Google Webmaster Tools Shows Search Traffic

Now that your site is being indexed and has no crawl errors, we can look at how people find your site. The search traffic analytics report is the most important report as it will show information about the keywords used to find your site, which cannot be accessed from any other source. The search traffic analytics report will show you a list of keywords, how many times your site appeared for that keyword, and how many clicks your link received. It will also show you the link's average Search Engine Results Page (SERP), the page on which the link appears.

You can find a few bits of crucial information from this report.

1. If your link ranks high (position is around 1) but doesn't get that many clicks, you may need to look at your meta description or titles to entice people to click the link over competitors' links.
2. If your link ranks high, and the impressions are high (>100) but not getting clicks, you also need to optimise the meta description and title.
3. If your link ranks low (position > 3), you need to optimise the page for the keyword.

The report will also show a list of websites linking to your site. This can be useful as it shows sites bringing in traffic you may want to link back to. You can also see your most linked content and how that data is linked.

Google Webmaster Tools Lets You Decide Search Appearance

The following section to look at in the Search Console is the Search Appearance. This section will give you a few tools that you can use to see how Google views your site and how the data is displayed on the search pages.

If your site uses structured data (microdata, rich cards), you can see how Google sees them and see if any errors prevent it from showing correctly in the results. You can also use the data highlighter to help Google understand the data on your site by tagging a bit of relevant content.

There is also a report containing any HTML improvements Google thinks would improve the pages. They will highlight issues such as duplicate content, duplicate descriptions or titles, content that is too short, or any other areas they deem beneficial to resolve.

Google Webmaster Tools Informs You Of Security Issues

The final area of interest is the security issues tab. This will show you if Google has detected any malicious content on any of your websites which could lead to Google blacklisting your domain.

Typically, these come from your site being hacked and malware uploaded. It should be addressed as a high priority if anything is detected here. Once the issue(s) have been fixed, mark them as resolved. Due to the severity of security issues, a human at Google manually verifies each item as fixed. Because of this, it may take time to get relisted.