Google Search Console: NEW! Features Coming Soon

The Google Search Console is a free tool by Google that allows you to track the technical side of your website. It lets you know if there are any errors that need to be fixed, allows you to find out which websites are linking back to your site and review the mobile usability of your website amongst many other activities.

Early last year Google released a new updated version of this search tool while still allowing users to use the older version. This is because not all the functionality of the old console was available on the new version.

Over the past year, there have been incremental updates to Google Search Console such as the improved reporting facilities. The next updates will be coming towards the end of March 2019. These updates will transfer across some of the reports from the older version while others will be removed. So, with that said, let’s take a glimpse of what’s changing.

NEW! Features and Changes

There are plenty of new features that have been added to Google Search Console, a few of these include:

User Management – The user management functionality has been moved to the Settings section.

URL Inspection Tool – The URL inspection tool offers a wealth of information such as current indexing, HTTP headers, page resource and more.

Sitemaps Data – The old report will be removed and in the future image and video data will be added.

Crawl Errors – The data in the coverage report has been made more actionable allowing you to find and fix errors much quicker.

What’s Being Removed?

HTML Suggestions – This is a useful tool for many. It allowed you to find duplicate meta titles and titles that were too long or short amongst other things. Google said:

“Google’s algorithms have gotten better at showing and improving titles over the years.”

Google

Property Sets – Users were able to manage different properties with this feature. However, usage of this feature was too low to warrant it being transferred across to Google’s new search console. Google will be implementing a better way to manage search console accounts.

Android Apps – This will be removed as it the more relevant functionality has already been moved to the Firebase console in previous years. Firebase console is a tool used to help you build and track your mobile apps.

Blocked Resources – Usage of this tool has dropped significantly as developers have got better at building websites therefore Google have decided to remove it.

Structure Data Dashboard – Google continues to progress and evolve its search results with Rich Results. Some structured data types that are no longer supported will be removed.

Conclusion

Google Search Console is an extremely useful tool that you should get to know even if it’s just the basics. It will help you to understand what’s going on with your website. A tool that every SEO strategy should be using.

You can read the full blog from Google if you wish.