Google Webmaster Is Now Google Search Central

Google Webmaster

Google Search Central (previously Webmasters) is a web service provided by Google. It provides you information about how Google sees your website and what you should do to resolve the problems that can obstruct ranking in the SERPs. It’s not a mandatory requirement for a website but it helps a lot to bring more relevant traffic by monitoring and optimizing it according to the best SEO practices.

In 2005, its name was Google Sitemaps, then in 2006, it became Google Webmaster Central. Again, it was renamed as Google Search Console in 2015 and is now also called ‘Google Search Central’.

Who is it for?

Google Webmaster or Google Search Console (GSC) is a tool not just for the webmasters, but also for business owners, SEO experts, marketers, programmers, app developers, graphics designers, etc. This tool can help in many different ways.

Things you can do in the Google Search Console:

• Submit a sitemap and also check it.
• View statistics of when Googlebot crawls access a site. Also, you can learn about what Google discovers, how it crawls and indexes your website.
• Check and write the robots.txt file.
• Fix errors that Google finds on your site.
• Submit the updated website content to Google index.
• Monitor search performance (analytics) by countries, pages, queries, etc.

More things that can help improve your SEO with Google Search Central are mentioned by Search Engine Land, have a look here.

GSC is very beneficial for marketers and is helping a lot of digital agencies in their work. With the help of it, they can easily up-rank their clients’ websites and provide them with many other facilities including analytics for their site.

Why has Google changed the name and what’s new?

Google changed the decade-old name of the tool, why? Because, as the name was webmasters, it wasn’t being utilized by every other person who didn’t have the same responsibilities as a webmaster does, resulting in the tool’s utilization being limited, even when it had all the essential features marketers and web developers could use easily. With this change in name, the tool becomes more generally accepted as something anyone in the field of marketing can use, not just webmasters.

Nothing new was added or changed with the name, but over time Google keeps introducing new features and options to its products, so some new functionalities have been added to the Google Webmaster tool.

The URL for GSC was still the same as before, but a shortened one was made by google i.e. g.co/SearchConsole.

Was this the right decision?

In our opinion, Google took exactly the right decision, as the audience that was using the service was comparatively very less due to the confusion created by the previous name. Now, as the name is Search Console, everyone that wants to improve search visibility is looking into it.

These are some details about Google Search Central. Google changed the name for better understanding and to bring more traffic to their tool. What do you think about this decision taken by Google? Don’t forget to let us know in the comment section!