On May 20, Google announced after nearly a decade, the company will be renaming the Google Webmaster Tools service to Google Search Console. Google is making this change to appeal to more users, since the traditional definition of the term ‘webmaster’ does not cover all the users of the service. The company stated on their blog post, “So, to make sure that our product includes everyone who cares about Search, we’ve decided to rebrand Google Webmaster Tools as Google Search Console.”
The announcement comes just two weeks after Google announced the new Search Analytics report in Webmaster Tools. While there have not been many updates to the site yet, Google stated they will be updating the branding across the product in the coming weeks.
Google Search Console will still have the same great features of the Webmaster Tools service:
- Discover the search queries that brought users to your site. Monitoring these search queries allows you to work on improving your click-through rate.
- Detect and quickly fix URL errors or crawl errors for both desktop and mobile versions of your site.
- Be sure your site doesn’t employ duplicate title tags or meta descriptions.
- Submit sitemaps to ensure Google indexes all your website’s pages.
- Quickly detect malware.
Using the data from Google Search Console allows you to gain insight into how users find your site. Instead of flying blind, you can make optimization decisions based off concrete data.
So, whether you are an SEO expert, a small business owner, a programmer, a marketer or any other user, let Google Search Console work for you. Visit Google’s new shortlink to get started: g.co/SearchConsole!
