by

Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, (January 09, 2018)

Google began testing a new Search Console, formerly known as Webmaster Tools, in July 2017, and announced Monday the rollout to website owners globally.

The latest edition, built from scratch, guides users through pending issues, provides the ability to share reports to collaborate with multiple departments within an organization, and provides updates on Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) status, and Job posting reports.

Most importantly, it gives marketers back the data. Historical data to evaluate data ranges Search Performance reporting — something that has been a major issue for webmasters for years.

The new Performance reporting feature offers 16 months of data to make analyzing longer-term trends and year-over-year comparisons easier. This data will also become available via the Search Console API.

Reporting highlights metrics on Google Search site performances like average position in search results, total impressions, and click-through rate (CTR).

The updated Index Coverage report, which works best when websites submits sitemap files, serves insights into the indexing of URLs from an owner’s website. It shows correctly indexed URLs, warnings about potential issues, and reasons why Google is not indexing some URLs. The report is built on our new Issue tracking feature. It alerts the user when new issues are detected and helps monitor the fixes.

It works by drilling down into a specific issue that webmasters and marketers see in a sample of URLs on their site. Clicking on error URLs brings up the page details with links to diagnostic-tools to find the source of the problem.

The new Search Console also helps to confirm issues that have been resolved. Users select a flagged issue and click “validate fix.” Google will then crawl and reprocess the affected URLs with a higher priority, helping the site to get back on track faster than ever.

Starting today, Google will make both versions available, allowing marketers and webmasters to use both until the new one is ready to exit beta.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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