We came across an email from the Google Webmaster Blog a few weeks ago, and boy, was it good news. Google has finally released a URL Inspection Tool on the Google Search Console. Here’s what they said…
One of our most common user requests in Search Console is for more details on how Google Search sees a specific URL. We listened, and today we’ve started launching a new tool, “URL inspection,” to provide these details so Search becomes more transparent. The URL Inspection tool provides detailed crawl, index, and serving information about your pages, directly from the Google index.
You put in a URL that you own, it spits out this appetizing report that will help you analyze and fix issues on your site. If it is indexed properly, the report will tell you enhancements it found on your page to make that indexing easier.
And if it isn’t indexed properly, Google will lay out why so you can track it down and fix it. These issues will be laid out straight for you.
What is ‘noindex’???
So, what does this change?
Remember the days when hot dog buns didn’t exist? No. No one does. What a bleak, sad world that would be… This new URL inspection tool needed to happen. Who has a website and doesn’t care if it works or not? Once again, no one. This tool allows you to plug in an existing URL and learn the fixable issues or learn that your webpage is crawling and indexing well.
From a Marketing Standpoint…
It’s no secret that a website is the principle of most companies’ marketing efforts. It’s on your business cards, its on your emails, and you tell people to go there. So, something like this can certainly help anybody, but in regards to specific marketing efforts, it can help optimize your marketing flow as well.
- Google Analytics shows that bounce rates are high? You can track down the URL that bounce rates are happening at, plug that into the URL Inspection Tool and get your answer. Then, give the people what they want.
- Your AdWord campaigns aren’t ranking as high as you’d like? Well, you might not realize that the landing page has a lot to do with AdWord placement. If it is, then plug it into the URL Inspection Tool and find out how to make it more “Google friendly”, so your ads can dominate.
- E-Commerce sites definitely need to know that landing pages are acting as they should. You shouldn’t be posting a garbage link on social and other shopping sites, so the URL Inspection Tool can help smooth out the user experience by exposing issues.
- Anywhere that you might be posting a URL to attract leads to your site – Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, a bathroom stall. That link needs to be tested for indexing to make sure Google likes it.
The biggest thing that the URL Inspection Tool affords us is an opportunity to optimize. Everything in business, marketing, and life works better when optimized well. Because the Google Search Console is free to use, this tool basically acts as a free website consultant for all the URLs you own. We now have the capability to find issues faster and fix them, thus helping SEO, social media, email marketing, you name it.
Google just released this a few weeks ago and are rolling it out. You might not have it yet, but it’s coming. Enjoy.