Webmaster rolls out new Search Console

New-Search-Console

This has been coming for quite some time. Google Webmaster is slowly rolling out an update to the Search Console. The new search console is a much cleaner interface with most of the reports and insights hidden under multiple layers.

The Dashboard

The new Search Console dashboard is much more simpler now, with just three reports that you can view –

  1. Performance – How your site is performing in the search results. This is similar to the Search Analytics report.
  2. Index Coverage – How your site has been indexed and what errors does the search engine detect on the site
  3. AMP – Information about the Accelerated Mobile Pages and how Google detects AMP on your site

The good things

Straight off the cuff, this tool provides just the right information to the user. It forces the user to engage with the reports available, and provides interesting insights that were not available before.

Take a look at this new report which tells me the impact on Search Impressions when I decided to mark 75 odd pages on noindex.

Index Coverage Reports Insight
The report shows how I have lost impressions because of adding noindex to pages

Overall, most reports even if being the same are now much more easier to understand and interpret.

Another example is the Performance report with the Pages section selected. This feature was available in the older interface as well, but now the data is much more clear and this tells me which pages should I work on to improve my CTRs.

Search Analytics Report
I need to tweak the description and meta details of some of the top pages

The bad things

There are more things yet to come, and this is not a complete experience yet. I cannot only rely on the new interface. Some reports simply haven’t been incorporated into the new Search Console yet.

Reports on Structured Data is completely missing. The diagnostic set of tools and the crawl request tools are not included in the tool.

The update to the search console is welcome and I for one am glad that a much more cleaner interface is made available.

Life without Google – Gives me the heebie jeebies!

For all the awesome things that Google does, there are always concerns about privacy, data sharing and access to insane personal information. So much so that there is an interesting site out there in the blue nothing – One Day without Google.

This got me thinking. As a collective, we criticize the Search Giant so much, but if it were not for Google, what would we be doing now?

How would life be without Google?

Continue reading “Life without Google – Gives me the heebie jeebies!”

Google Search Easter Eggs

The good folks at Google have a great sense of humor. Ever since the launch of GMail on the 1st of April, and the subsequent April Fool jokes, we are always guessing what hidden joke lurks in each of the Google products. Here are some of them that I have found, you can check them out too!

I am also including some of the outputs, which you can try by yourself as well!

Do a Barrel Roll

Search this term in Google search, and watch the fun as the search queries take a tumble, and literally does a barrel roll!

barrelroll

Askew

Search this term in Google search, and see the screen go askew!!

askew

Ascii Art

Search for this, and the Google logo shows you what Ascii Art is all about!

Recursion

Have you noticed that when search on Google, if you do typographical mistakes, Google corrects you by asking you “Did you mean <corrected spelling>”. Try searching recursion on Google!

There are more such easter eggs in Google, but they are time bound (for example searching football during the Soccer World Cup would give you an interested Pagination navigation on Google).

As a bonus, try this out in your Google Reader – up up down down left right left right b a b a (and beware of the ninja!).