GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE BASICS

Crawling

Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site. Google’s crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Make sure Google can index your site

Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as title tags and alt attributes. Google can process many types of content. However, while we can process HTML, PDF, and Flash files, but hard for rich media or dynamic pages like Silverlight.

• Check your site’s index stats.
• Review your site’s structure. Make sure your content is text-based and readable helps make it more accessible to humans and to Googlebot.

Serving results

When a user enters a query, Google machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. Make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. Use Google Webmaster Guidelines outline improve your site’s ranking. Google’s Did you mean and Google Autocomplete features are designed to help users save time by displaying related terms, common misspellings, and popular queries.

Check your site is in the Google index

• Do a site: search to determine if your site is still in Google index, perform a Google site search for its entire URL.
• Verify that your site ranks for your domain nameDo a Google search for www.[yourdomain].com. If your site doesn’t appear in the results, or if it ranks poorly in the results, your site may have a manual spam action for violations of the Webmaster Guidelines. Use Sitemaps to tell Google about the pages you consider most important.
• Check the Manual Actions page If your site’s ranking is impacting by a manual spam action, we’ll tell you about it on the Manual Actions page of Search Console.

Make sure Google can find and crawl your site

• Check for crawl errors. The Crawl errors page in Search Console provides details about the URLs in your site that we tried to crawl and couldn’t access. Review these errors, and fix any you can.
• Review your robots.txt file. The Test robots.txt tool lets you analyze your robots.txt file to see if you’re blocking Googlebot from any URLs or directories on your site.
• Make sure that the URLs haven’t been blocked with meta tags.
• Review your site structure and make sure that it’s easily accessible.
• Use 301 redirects (“RedirectPermanent”) in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with a .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.) For more information about 301 HTTP redirects, please see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt.
• Create custom 404 pages: A 404 page is what a user sees when they try to reach a non-existent page on your site (because they’ve clicked on a broken link, the page has been deleted, or they’ve mistyped a URL).
• Consider creating and submitting a Sitemap.
• Verify your site ownership: Verification is the process of proving that you own the site or app that you claim to own. We need to confirm ownership because once you are verified for a site or app you have access to its private Google Search data, and can affect how Google Search crawls it. Either add a new site or click Manage Property > Verify this property on the Search Console home page next to the existing property that you want to verify.

Make sure your content is relevant and useful

• Understand how users are reaching your site by reviewing the Search Queries page. The first column shows the Google searches in which your site most often appears. The page also lists the number of impressions, the number of clicks, and the CTR (click-through rate) for each query. This information is particularly useful because it gives you an insight into what users are searching for (the query) and the queries for which users often click on your site. Consider revising your content to make it more compelling and relevant. Avoid keyword stuffing.
• Check the HTML Improvements page in Search Console. Descriptive information in title tags and meta descriptions will give us good information about the content of your site. In addition, this text can appear in search results pages, and useful, descriptive text is more likely to be clicked on by users.
• Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors.
• Check to see if any of your content has been flagged as adult content by turning off SafeSearch. Google’s SafeSearch filter eliminates sites that contain pornography and explicit sexual content from search results. While no filter is 100% accurate, SafeSearch uses advanced proprietary technology that checks keywords and phrases, URLs, and Open Directory categories.
• Great image content can be an excellent way to generate traffic. Create the best user experience you can, and follow our image guidelines.
• There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. Occasionally, fluctuation in search results is the result of differences in Google data centers.

To learn more check out the WordPress Tutorial Google Search Console on How to Use it with WordPress.

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