If you run a website and are concerned about your site’s search rankings, you may have wondered how your site displays on Google and other search engines.
Webmasters know the pain of having to manually search their own sites and check Google to see if their applied metatags stick—and if you constantly change these tags, you’re going to have to wait until Google refreshes their web caches for the new ones to show up.
Well, Google has heard the prayers of every beleaguered webmaster out there, because it’s finally debuted its own URL inspection tool last month. The tool can show you your crawl, index, and serving information of all your webpages. It’s now available to all users, after a 15-day beta testing period.
Using The New Tool
How do you use Google’s URL inspection tool? It’s simple: just access the tool on the Google Search Console, and enter the URL of a website or webpage that you own.
Once you do that, it will serve up all relevant information for your URL—whether it works (that is, displayed on any Google search results), when it was last crawled, whether it’s indexed, as well as information on all other enhancements and other insights. If your page doesn’t measure up to Google’s standards, it will also tell you why as well as show you other pages suffering from the same issue, so you can go about fixing the bugs on your website.
Beta Release
Other than the new URL inspection tool, the beta version of the Google Search Console also has new features added to it. You can now check out 16 months’ worth of traffic data on the Search Analytics API, a new “recipe” format of rich reports, and new search appearance filters in the Search Analytics API which shows different formats.
Google’s Attack Against Spam
In other news, Google has also detailed their efforts on strengthening security against hackers and what they call “spam”—not useless junk e-mail, but rather their definition of sites and webmasters that are trying to game the search system for their own benefit and profit, undermining the whole point of what Google is trying to do. They’ve discussed how they increased their efforts from 2017.
They’ve created a resource to help out webmasters who need to make their sites more secure, as well as increased the amount of information available to help them recover hacked websites.
In other efforts, they have also tweaked and modified their ranking algorithms in order to discourage the use of unnatural links (spammed deceptive outbound links maliciously designed to increase search rankings) as well as making some escalable manual actions, and continue to increase security efforts so as to not compromise innocent websites and webmasters.
So if you’re planning to run a website, or are already running a website, you can be confident that Google, with all its tools, is trying to make a fair and even playing field for you. Now there are very few reasons for you to give in to dirty players in the search game.
