Google “Search Console” is the new “Webmaster Tools”

Although the tool is still very much the same, Google will no longer refer to Google Webmaster Tools and now calls it the Search Console. Google announced the name change in a recent blog post stating:

For nearly ten years, Google Webmaster Tools has provided users with constantly evolving tools and metrics to help make fantastic websites that our systems love showing in Google Search. In the past year, we sought to learn more about you, the loyal users of Google Webmaster Tools: we wanted to understand your role and goals in order to make our product more useful to you.

The announcement also stated that they would be rolling out the updated branding across the product over the coming weeks. This change was made to remove the stigma of “Webmaster” from the tool as it should be leveraged by anyone who cares about their websites performance in the search engines. Business owners, marketers, content developers and yes, webmasters should all check webmaster tools on a regular basis to keep their finger on the pulse of their websites health.

While there were no new features announced with this branding change there have been a number of notable updates to the toolset, namely the Search Analytics tool which is now sporting a new sexier graph and more configurable filters.

Google Webmaster Tools (or now Google Search Console) provides rich insight into how Google sees our website and what items they believe would be helpful for us to focus on to improve the visitor’s experience. If you have not already registered your site with your name it is highly recommended to do so.

Give it a spin by accessing g.co/SearchConsole.