New Google Search Console Beta UPDATES

Google made a big announcement the other day stating they will now automatically verify users in Google Search Console with the ownership of a Google Analytics property. This is a game changer because so many more users will be presented with Google’s Search Console tool and gives more users a great tool to help them closer to a healthy website.

Most people know and use Google Analytics but not so much use Search Console. This is clearly a push for Google to shed more awareness on their useful tools for webmasters as they continually add to their new Search Console.

Google Search Console is a great tool that every marketer/webmaster should be using alongside Google Analytics. It has great information about all different aspects of your site along with improvement recommendations but most of all, it sends you email notifications. These email notifications can consist of website penalties (manual actions), indexing issues, crawl issues, upgrades and other important updates from Google.

This announcement comes with great timing due to the newly added features to Search Console Beta. Now keep in mind, the new Search Console isn’t brand new; it was announced back in January 2018. However, when they first launched the Beta it had minimal features but as of late they have been adding more useful features to it.

Just the other day the new Search Console added a Links Report feature, similar to the old (still currently accessible) version, and it is much better in my opinion. Here is what Google said about the release which is probably the best part about it:

“Data in this report is more accurate than the old Links to your site report. As a result, the values in the new report may be lower, but this does not indicate a drop in links, but rather a more accurate and secure way of reporting them.”

Here are the different types of data you can get from it:

• Top linking domains (Which sites link to me the most)
• Top linked pages (Which are my top linked pages from other sites)
• Which are my top linked pages from a specific site
• Top linking text (What link text points to my site)
• What are the links from a specific site to my page
• What are the top sites linking to my page
• Top linked pages (Which of my pages is linked the most from within my own site)
• Which of my pages links to my page

A week ago Google announced on Twitter that they added “Manage users and permissions,” “add sites and validate ownership,” and “mobile usability report” to the new beta version of Search Console.

🆕Freshly released features in the new Search Console:

- Manage users and permissions ⚙️👥
- Add sites and validate ownership ➕✅
- Mobile Usability report 📱 pic.twitter.com/rlHo9iseqk

— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) August 15, 2018

Then a month ago they launched the URL inspection tool which lets you know quite a few things about a URL on your site. Things such as if a certain URL on your site can be found on Google, whether or not it is indexed and whether or not it is mobile friendly which are all things that attribute to a page's ranking.

These are all great updates/features that can help ensure a healthy site and good standing with Google. We definitely expect more cool features to drop in the coming months, mainly because they have a section for "Coming Soon..." but we will certainly keep an eye out. It is most certainly a much slicker and modern UX for sure. To close, I just want to say that the fact that verified owners in Google Analytics can auto-verify you in Search Console is a nice little treat. Those kinds of treats from Google make things just a little easier for us marketers. :)