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A Beginner’s Guide to Google Search Console

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a beginners guide to google search console

Want to know how your SEO efforts are paying off?

Google provides a free tool called Google Search Console that provides a ton of detailed information about your site’s performance, security issues, errors, and more.

How does it work? That’s what we’re going to cover today.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a suite of tools from Google that helps you track your site’s performance, find issues, and help your site rank higher in Google. It is a powerful, but complex, tool.

Back in 2010, we wrote a thorough beginner’s guide to Google Webmaster Tools. Since then, there have been significant changes to Google Webmaster Tools, including a rebranding as Google Search Console.

We’ve updated this guide to include how to set up Google Search Console, what data you’ll find about your website, important data you might have forgotten about, and how to continually monitor for any issues that might affect your search engine rankings.

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How to Set Up Google Search Console

If you haven’t already, the first thing you will need to do is set up your website with Google Search Console.

To do this, visit the Search Console website, sign in with your Google Account – preferably the one you are already using for Google Analytics.

Click the Add Property button in the upper left corner, and you’ll see this dialogue box:

Google search console guide add property.

Select the URL prefix, as it gives you more options for verification.

Next, you will have to verify this site as yours.

Previously, this involved having to embed code into your website header or upload an HTML file to your web server.

Now, if you already have Google Analytics, it will automatically verify your site for you and you will see this:

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google search console owership authorization.

If this doesn’t work for you, use one of these other options for verification.

Once your site is verified, you will want to submit a sitemap if you have one available.

This is a simple XML file that will tell Google Search Console what pages you have on your website

If you have one already, you can usually find it by typing in http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml to see it in your browser.

To create a sitemap if you don’t already have one, you can use online tools like XML Sitemaps.

If you are running a website on your own domain using WordPress, you can install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

Once you have activated the plugin, look under your Settings in the WordPress dashboard and click on XML-Sitemap.

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The plugin should have already generated your sitemap, so there’s nothing else you have to do.

You’ll find your URL at the very top of the page:

search engines haven't been notified yet

Copy the link address and head back over to Google Search console, then paste it under “Add a new site map” in GSC.

google search console sitemap

It may take a few days for Search Console to start pulling information about your website.

Be sure to wait a bit, then keep reading to find out what else you can learn from Google Search Console!

What Data Can You Pull From Google Search Console?

Once you’ve added and verified your website, you’ll be able to see tons of information about your site performance in GSC.

Remember, this is a powerful tool; these are only the highlights of new types of data and the important data you should remember to check on occasionally.

Google Search Console Overview

Google search console overview

When you visit your website in GSC, you will first see your Overview.

This is an overview of the important data within Google Search Console. You can visit specific areas such as your Crawl Errors, Search Analytics, and Sitemaps from this screen by clicking on the applicable links.

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You can also navigate to these areas using the menu in the left sidebar.

Search Results

In the left sidebar, you’ll see is Search Results.

Google search console search results

This section gives you an overview of how your site appears in the Search Engine Results Page, including total clicks, impressions, position, click-through rate, and what queries your site shows up for.

The filters at the top allow you to sort data based on location, date, type of search, and much more. This data is crucial to understanding the impact of your SEO efforts.

Index Coverage Report

This report gives you data about the URLs that Google has tried to index on your selected property and any problems Google has had.

As Googlebot crawls the Internet, it processes each page it comes across to compile an index of every word it sees on every page.

It also looks at content tags and attributes like your Titles or alt texts.

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index coverage report google search console

This graph shows a breakdown of the URLs on your site that have been indexed by Google and can thus appear in search results.

As you add and remove pages, this graph will change with you.

Don’t worry too much if you have a smaller number of indexed pages than you think you should. Googlebot filters out the URLs it sees as a duplicate, non-canonical, or those with a no index meta tag.

You’ll also notice a number of URLs that have been disallowed from crawling by your robots.txt file.

And you can also check on how many URLs you’ve removed with the Removal Tool. This will most likely always be a low value.

Sitemaps

I mentioned sitemaps earlier, so I’ll cover this again in brief.

In GSC under “Sitemaps,” you will see information about your sitemap, including if you have one and when it was last updated.

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If you notice the last date your sitemap was downloaded is not recent, you might want to submit your sitemap to refresh the number of URLs submitted.

Otherwise, this helps you keep track of how Google is reading your sitemap and whether or not all of your pages are viewed as you want them to be.

Removals

If for some reason you need to temporarily block a page from Google’s search results, head to removals.

google search console URL removal

You can hide a page for approximately 90 days before this wears off.

If you want to permanently remove a page from Google’s crawling, you’ll have to do it on your actual website.

Core Website Vitals

Core website vitals are a set of metrics that impact your search ranking. They include speed, usability, and visual stability. These are now ranking signals, so you’ll want to pay attention to them.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source initiative designed to provide fast-loading mobile websites that work with slow connection speeds.

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You can go here to get started creating your first page if you haven’t got one already.

You’ll be given a boilerplate piece of coding that you can customize to your site.

accelerated mobile pages boilerplate code

To view pages in GSC, head to Enhancements > AMP.

Links to Your Site

Curious about your backlinks?

GSC shows you the domains that link to you the most as well as the pages on your website with the most links. Scroll down in the left side bar until you see “links.” Click and you’ll see a full report of links to your site:

google search console links

This is probably the most comprehensive listing of your backlinks (and internal links!) that you will find, for free at least.

It’s a powerful tool to know where your content is being leveraged around the web, and what performs best in Google’s eyes.

Manual Actions

The Manual Actions tab is where you can find out if any of your pages are not compliant with Google’s webmaster quality guidelines.

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It’s one of the ways that Google has taken action against web spamming.

Mobile Usability

On the Mobile Usability tab, you can check to make sure that all of your website’s pages are aligned with what Google considers best practice.

mobile usability google search console

As you can see, you can have issues with text size, viewport settings, or even the proximity of your clickable elements.

Any of these problems, as well as other errors, can negatively affect your mobile site’s rankings and push you lower on the results page. Finding and fixing these errors will help your user experience and results.

While reviewing this information, I suggest that you also check your site’s mobile speed. I use Ubersuggest to do so.

The first thing you want to do is type your URL into the search box and click “Search.”

use ubersuggest to check mobile usage report.

After clicking the “Search” button, click “Site Audit” in the left sidebar and then scroll down the page until you seed “Site Speed.”

ubersuggest mobile usablity Google search console guide

You’ll see the site speed for both desktop and mobile devices. For the sake of this exercise, we’re more interested in mobile loading time. My site loads on mobile devices in two seconds, which scores in the excellent range.

In addition to overall site speed, there’s also an advanced breakdown for:

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  • First contentful paint
  • Speed index
  • Time to interactive
  • First meaningful paint
  • First CPU idle
  • Estimated input latency

If you see any issues here, fix them immediately, and then re-test your site. It may be enough to improve your loading time.

Crawl Stats

For a more in-depth analysis of how often Googlebot is looking at your site, you can use the Crawl Stats report under Settings > Crawl stats.

Here, you’ll see how often the pages of your site are crawled, how many kilobytes are downloaded per day, and what the download times of your site are.

Google search console crawl stats report
time spent downloading a page

According to Google, there is no “good” crawl number, but they do have advice for any sudden spikes or drops in your crawl rates.

Fetch as Google (Now Called URL Inspection)

This tool is helpful as it lets actually do a test run of how Google crawls and renders a specific URL on your site.

It’s a helpful way to make sure that Googlebot can access a page that might otherwise be left to guesswork.

URL inspection google search console

If you’re successful, the page will render, and you’ll be able to see if any resources are blocked to Googlebot.

If you want access to the code of your site, click “View Tested Page” to see the HTML, a screenshot, and any crawl errors. (Note: Crawl errors used to be its own report, now it’s located in URL inspection under “Coverage.”)

When you get to the debugging point of web development, you can’t beat this free tool.

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Robots.txt Tester

If you’re using a robot.txt file to block Google’s crawlers from a specific resource, this tool allows you to double-check that everything is working.

So if you have an image you don’t want to appear in a Google Image Search, you can test your robot.txt here to make sure that your image isn’t popping up where you don’t want it.

When you test, you’ll either receive an Accepted or Blocked message, and you can edit accordingly.

URL Parameters

Google themselves recommend using this tool sparingly, as an incorrect URL parameter can negatively impact how your site is crawled.

You can read more about how to properly use URL parameters from Google.

When you do use them, this tool will help you keep tabs on their performance and make sure they’re not pointing Googlebot in the wrong direction.

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Conclusion

Google Search Console can give you powerful insights into how your site performs, as well as what you can do to keep Google’s attention. Once you have the basics down, learn how to use GSC data to increase your traffic by 28 percent or more.

Do you use Google Search Console? What areas do you find most useful? Please share your thoughts in the comments below, and happy data analyzing!

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Exploring the Evolution of Language Translation: A Comparative Analysis of AI Chatbots and Google Translate

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A Comparative Analysis of AI Chatbots and Google Translate

According to an article on PCMag, while Google Translate makes translating sentences into over 100 languages easy, regular users acknowledge that there’s still room for improvement.

In theory, large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are expected to bring about a new era in language translation. These models consume vast amounts of text-based training data and real-time feedback from users worldwide, enabling them to quickly learn to generate coherent, human-like sentences in a wide range of languages.

However, despite the anticipation that ChatGPT would revolutionize translation, previous experiences have shown that such expectations are often inaccurate, posing challenges for translation accuracy. To put these claims to the test, PCMag conducted a blind test, asking fluent speakers of eight non-English languages to evaluate the translation results from various AI services.

The test compared ChatGPT (both the free and paid versions) to Google Translate, as well as to other competing chatbots such as Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini. The evaluation involved comparing the translation quality for two test paragraphs across different languages, including Polish, French, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Tagalog, and Amharic.

In the first test conducted in June 2023, participants consistently favored AI chatbots over Google Translate. ChatGPT, Google Bard (now Gemini), and Microsoft Bing outperformed Google Translate, with ChatGPT receiving the highest praise. ChatGPT demonstrated superior performance in converting colloquialisms, while Google Translate often provided literal translations that lacked cultural nuance.

For instance, ChatGPT accurately translated colloquial expressions like “blow off steam,” whereas Google Translate produced more literal translations that failed to resonate across cultures. Participants appreciated ChatGPT’s ability to maintain consistent levels of formality and its consideration of gender options in translations.

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The success of AI chatbots like ChatGPT can be attributed to reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), which allows these models to learn from human preferences and produce culturally appropriate translations, particularly for non-native speakers. However, it’s essential to note that while AI chatbots outperformed Google Translate, they still had limitations and occasional inaccuracies.

In a subsequent test, PCMag evaluated different versions of ChatGPT, including the free and paid versions, as well as language-specific AI agents from OpenAI’s GPTStore. The paid version of ChatGPT, known as ChatGPT Plus, consistently delivered the best translations across various languages. However, Google Translate also showed improvement, performing surprisingly well compared to previous tests.

Overall, while ChatGPT Plus emerged as the preferred choice for translation, Google Translate demonstrated notable improvement, challenging the notion that AI chatbots are always superior to traditional translation tools.


Source: https://www.pcmag.com/articles/google-translate-vs-chatgpt-which-is-the-best-language-translator

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Google Implements Stricter Guidelines for Mass Email Senders to Gmail Users

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Beginning in April, Gmail senders bombarding users with unwanted mass emails will encounter a surge in message rejections unless they comply with the freshly minted Gmail email sender protocols, Google cautions.

Fresh Guidelines for Dispatching Mass Emails to Gmail Inboxes In an elucidative piece featured on Forbes, it was highlighted that novel regulations are being ushered in to shield Gmail users from the deluge of unsolicited mass emails. Initially, there were reports surfacing about certain marketers receiving error notifications pertaining to messages dispatched to Gmail accounts. Nonetheless, a Google representative clarified that these specific errors, denoted as 550-5.7.56, weren’t novel but rather stemmed from existing authentication prerequisites.

Moreover, Google has verified that commencing from April, they will initiate “the rejection of a portion of non-compliant email traffic, progressively escalating the rejection rate over time.” Google elaborates that, for instance, if 75% of the traffic adheres to the new email sender authentication criteria, then a portion of the remaining non-conforming 25% will face rejection. The exact proportion remains undisclosed. Google does assert that the implementation of the new regulations will be executed in a “step-by-step fashion.”

This cautious and methodical strategy seems to have already kicked off, with transient errors affecting a “fraction of their non-compliant email traffic” coming into play this month. Additionally, Google stipulates that bulk senders will be granted until June 1 to integrate “one-click unsubscribe” in all commercial or promotional correspondence.

Exclusively Personal Gmail Accounts Subject to Rejection These alterations exclusively affect bulk emails dispatched to personal Gmail accounts. Entities sending out mass emails, specifically those transmitting a minimum of 5,000 messages daily to Gmail accounts, will be mandated to authenticate outgoing emails and “refrain from dispatching unsolicited emails.” The 5,000 message threshold is tabulated based on emails transmitted from the same principal domain, irrespective of the employment of subdomains. Once the threshold is met, the domain is categorized as a permanent bulk sender.

These guidelines do not extend to communications directed at Google Workspace accounts, although all senders, including those utilizing Google Workspace, are required to adhere to the updated criteria.

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Augmented Security and Enhanced Oversight for Gmail Users A Google spokesperson emphasized that these requisites are being rolled out to “fortify sender-side security and augment user control over inbox contents even further.” For the recipient, this translates to heightened trust in the authenticity of the email sender, thus mitigating the risk of falling prey to phishing attempts, a tactic frequently exploited by malevolent entities capitalizing on authentication vulnerabilities. “If anything,” the spokesperson concludes, “meeting these stipulations should facilitate senders in reaching their intended recipients more efficiently, with reduced risks of spoofing and hijacking by malicious actors.”

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Google’s Next-Gen AI Chatbot, Gemini, Faces Delays: What to Expect When It Finally Launches

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Google AI Chatbot Gemini

In an unexpected turn of events, Google has chosen to postpone the much-anticipated debut of its revolutionary generative AI model, Gemini. Initially poised to make waves this week, the unveiling has now been rescheduled for early next year, specifically in January.

Gemini is set to redefine the landscape of conversational AI, representing Google’s most potent endeavor in this domain to date. Positioned as a multimodal AI chatbot, Gemini boasts the capability to process diverse data types. This includes a unique proficiency in comprehending and generating text, images, and various content formats, even going so far as to create an entire website based on a combination of sketches and written descriptions.

Originally, Google had planned an elaborate series of launch events spanning California, New York, and Washington. Regrettably, these events have been canceled due to concerns about Gemini’s responsiveness to non-English prompts. According to anonymous sources cited by The Information, Google’s Chief Executive, Sundar Pichai, personally decided to postpone the launch, acknowledging the importance of global support as a key feature of Gemini’s capabilities.

Gemini is expected to surpass the renowned ChatGPT, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, and preliminary private tests have shown promising results. Fueled by significantly enhanced computing power, Gemini has outperformed GPT-4, particularly in FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second), owing to its access to a multitude of high-end AI accelerators through the Google Cloud platform.

SemiAnalysis, a research firm affiliated with Substack Inc., expressed in an August blog post that Gemini appears poised to “blow OpenAI’s model out of the water.” The extensive compute power at Google’s disposal has evidently contributed to Gemini’s superior performance.

Google’s Vice President and Manager of Bard and Google Assistant, Sissie Hsiao, offered insights into Gemini’s capabilities, citing examples like generating novel images in response to specific requests, such as illustrating the steps to ice a three-layer cake.

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While Google’s current generative AI offering, Bard, has showcased noteworthy accomplishments, it has struggled to achieve the same level of consumer awareness as ChatGPT. Gemini, with its unparalleled capabilities, is expected to be a game-changer, demonstrating impressive multimodal functionalities never seen before.

During the initial announcement at Google’s I/O developer conference in May, the company emphasized Gemini’s multimodal prowess and its developer-friendly nature. An application programming interface (API) is under development, allowing developers to seamlessly integrate Gemini into third-party applications.

As the world awaits the delayed unveiling of Gemini, the stakes are high, with Google aiming to revolutionize the AI landscape and solidify its position as a leader in generative artificial intelligence. The postponed launch only adds to the anticipation surrounding Gemini’s eventual debut in the coming year.

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