An average of 1.17 billion people use google search. So if you own a website it’s important for you to have access to how many people from this 1.17 billion view your website. And Search control helps you with that.
Google extended the search console’s accessibility with the URL inspection tool API which has many addons of WordPress themes and plugins and SEO tools. The service provider, Google, has also made an announcement on January 31st, 2022 about the release of a new URL inspection Application Programming Interface under the search console APIs. This basically allows a third-party app to connect with your search console and give out data from URL inspections.
Before heading into the major parts let’s get our basics clear on what a Google search console even means. Google offers a completely free service called the search console. If your site is present on Google’s search result page then using this service you can
- Monitor
- Maintain
- Troubleshoot
Reason to have a search console account:
It’s not mandatory to have a search console account to be listed in Google’s search result but as we mentioned above you get all those advantages for free of cost. And with this service, you can understand where your site is going wrong in Google’s view and use these points to correct them for the future and improve page experience for google.
Some of the tools and reports that the search console offer:
- Confirmation on whether or not Search Console crawling is possible with your site.
- If you face any indexing problem or have to request a re-indexing for an updated content search console is your fix
- The search console provides you with the traffic data for your site. Traffic data might include how frequently your site is shown in Google’s search results, What are the queries that show your site as an answer, how frequently do these queries get clicked, and much more
- Let’s say google runs into spam or indexing or any other issues with your site, search console looks to it that you receive an alert in that case.
- Shows which websites have given a backlink to your site.
- Search console also fixes issues for mobile usability, AMP, or even other search features.
Am I qualified to use the search console?
Well, to be honest, there are no qualifications to have a search console account but who do you think should have it? Every single person with a website! You can either be a specialist or a rookie your site could be specialized or generalized but the Search console is for all.
- Business owners: Though you might not be directly using the search console yourself you should know what it is. You should definitely get to know about basic search engine optimization and how to implement that to your site. Have knowledge of the features that google search has
- Marketers and other SEO specialists: If you are someone who is keen on digital marketing you should definitely have a search console as it reports to you all data that you will need about optimizing your ranking, other changes you should be doing regarding the search result of your site, and your website traffic. All those technical decisions that your site needs could be based on the search console data. Or even better is combining the data from other tools like Google ads, google analytics, and google trends to come up with an advanced marketing analysis.
- Website admins: If you are a website administrator you are someone who should care about the healthy functionality of your website. As you know, the search console helps you monitor the site. And at times it also fixes some major and n=minor issues like site load issues, server errors, and even some security and safety errors like malware and hacking. It also helps with smoothly adjusting the mishappens or maintenance of your website regarding search performance.
So now that we have basic knowledge on what and whys of search console let’s learn more about the URL Inspection tool
URL inspection tool
It basically provides you the info about a specific page’s Google’s indexed version. Indexing issues, AMP errors, and Structures data errors are the pieces of information mentioned.
Some of the reports that Google search console URL inspection offer:
The current index status of any URL can be seen– Get hold of the information about google’s indexed version of your page. And you can also analyze why your site is getting indexed or not getting indexed by google.
Live URLs can also be inspected– You can easily test an active page from your site, whether the page is being indexed or not.
You can always request URL indexing– You can request google to crawl or recrawl a page from your site.
The rendered version of a page– You can view the rendered version that is how your page will look in the eyes of google. There will be a screenshot provided. You can see the JavaScript output, loaded resources, and many more informative data. You can either click the View crawled page or View tested page to have a look at a list of pieces of information like page code and others.
A missing page could be troubleshooted– There could be a whole lot of reasons for your page not being indexed. And URL inspector can solve some of the causes for this issue.
Why is this API highly helpful?
Application Programming Interface orAPI, in general, is nothing but a software intermediator. It allows any two applications to exchange data and hold a conversation. This API is highly helpful because
- Now we get to know more issues
- With the discovery, we can debug them with much ease
- This also really helps with SEO.
API query limits
So the API cannot run a number of URLs in a single day, it has its limitations.
| S.no | Queries limit | Time period |
| 1 | 2000 | Per day |
| 2 | 600 | Per minute |
If this still sounds very complicated to you then Let Cuneiform help you out with your site’s ranking and search engine optimization. You can have a brief look at our SEO service and GIT with us.
