New Google Search Console: Out of beta, more features available

In its latest blog post dated September 4, 2018, Google declared that the new search console is now officially passed the beta phase.

In August 2017, Google made the official statement on its blog confirming that Google Search Console will be undergoing a heavy redesign to serve webmasters’ needs better. After a year of redesigns based on beta version feedback, Google has finally made the brand new search console available.

Google termed this as the new Search Console graduating out of the beta version and added that this graduation comes with some sophisticated updates like Manual Actions report and Test Live Capability  to the URL Inspection Tool.

The beta version introduced the URL inspection tool a few months back. It lets users to run page’s inspection when it’s live. It is largely helpful in debugging and repairing issues in a page and ensuring that a reported error or bug is still there in the page or not. When the reported bug or issue has been fixed, you can make reconsideration request to Google to recrawl and index your page for better rankings.

The story so far

Google introduced the new Search Console beta version in January 2018 and has been improving based on the user feedback since then. The most recent version gives you:

1. Index Coverage Report (enables you to examine your website content accurately)
2. Performance Report (allows you to review your search analytics data as old as 16 months)
3. Links Report (Get extensive information on your website’s link profile)
4. URL Inspection Tool (get comprehensive information on crawling, indexing and serving from Google Index)

The new Google Console offers better alerts:

• Automatic alerts along with a comprehensive list of pages that crawling, AMP, job posting issues, responsive issues, Indexing, etc has affected.
• Complete reports containing information on the HTML code where Google recommends a fix.

With these advanced features, it will be easy for webmasters and teams to share information swiftly to speed up the fixes. Moreover, the new Search Console will let webmasters and teams team notify Google easily once the issue has been taken care of.

Google will review and validate the response and send you back the detailed log of the findings made while validating.

For simple and better indexing, you can let Google know all about your website structure by submitting sitemaps. You can also add new websites to your account and invite new users and manage them as well.

Fresh out of Beta

The old search console still offers certain features that Google hasn’t yet been able to migrate to the new Search Console. However, the new version has everything commonly used available with further improvements.

In case, the new version contains an equivalent feature of the old version feature, the messages will encourage users to use the new version.

There will also be a reminder link in the old report which will be removed after a certain period of time.

Just in case you don’t know how to begin using the new Search Console, Google is providing complete assistance on how you can migrate to the new Search Console.