In this tutorial we are going to see how we can register a website in Google Search Console (former Google Wemaster Tools)
What is Search Console?
Google Search Console or directly Search Console, formerly called Webmaster Tools, is a free tool that Google makes available to website owners and managers so that they can easily control the presence of their sites in search results.
Although it is not necessary to register with Search Console to appear in the list of results, adding our sites will allow us to improve and analyze the performance of our sites in search results, since we can be informed of errors, analyze traffic, understand how you see our page the search engine or upload the sitemap of our website, among many other things.
All this and much more is explained in detail in the . We advise you to take a look at it, as well as the one where you will learn to improve your website in this regard. So let’s start at the beginning, let’s see how to add our site to GSC. Let’s go there!.
Add a site to Google Search Console
The first thing we have to do is access the page and log in with a Gmail account. Once inside we can add our website.
To do this, we enter the domain in the text field next to “Website” and click on “Add a property”.
Clicking will take us to another screen where we will be shown several ways with which we can verify the ownership of the site.
The recommended option, and the one that appears by default, is to upload a specific HTML file to our website, after which we would have to check that it is up, but it is also possible to do it by following other methods, as we can see in the tab “Alternative Methods”.
In this case we will verify the ownership of the site with the file that we have mentioned as we will see in the next section.
Verify Site Ownership
Well, as we have said, it is time to verify that the website that we have entered is our property, or that we have administration or management permissions on it.
This is a basic security rule since once we prove that the site is our property, we can perform various actions in Google Search Console, such as removing URLs from Google search results, so it is essential to demonstrate that we are authorized to do so.
So let’s continue with the process. To carry out the verification, several steps must be followed. The first will be to download the HTML file that we find on the current screen after adding the site property:
To do so, we will simply click on the download link that appears in point 1, and the file will be saved on our computer. Then we have to access the web through the FTP program that we usually use or the hosting file manager, and upload it to the root of it.
When we have it ready, we will go to point 3, we will click on the link to verify that the upload has been carried out correctly, and finally we will fill in the Google captcha and we will go to the fourth point, we will click on “Verify”. Once done, we will go to another screen that will show us if everything has been done correctly, and we will have to click “Continue”, which will finally jump to the Google Search Console Control Panel.
As we have just added the site, Google has not yet processed the traffic to our website, so the panel does not show us results. Later we will be able to see the crawl errors if they exist, information about the searches and some other data.
And that’s all? Well, certainly we have already added our site, but there would be some more tasks to do. Now we would have to repeat the process and include variants of the URL in GSC, as well as choose the preferred version of it.
On the other hand, it would also be very convenient to upload the sitemap of the site, this would facilitate its complete indexing. If you are interested in learning how to do it, it is explained in detail in , so we recommend you take a look at it.
Summary and conclusion
Search Console is a free tool that Google makes available to web managers to facilitate the task of controlling and maintaining the indexing of their sites.
Although it is not mandatory to register these sites to appear in the search results, it is recommended to do so as it will allow us to analyze and improve their performance in the results list. To add a site we can follow several paths, in this case we saw how to do it using an HTML file that we downloaded and uploaded to the server, with which we could later verify the ownership of the site.
And here is the tutorial! We hope you have found it useful. You know, if you want to continue the process in a guided way and learn about all the possibilities offered by Google Search Console, we recommend the . If you subscribe to , you will have access to it, and to more than 6044 videos where you can learn about online marketing, SEO and many other topics 🙂
Facebook Comments
Disqus