Google Webmaster Guide 2026

August 29, 2023

A Complete Beginner's Guide to Google Webmaster Tools 2026

Explore this Google webmaster guide for beginners to search console and justify your website’s errors very easily through this tool and make your website error-free.

What is Google Search Console: It’s a tool earlier known as Google Webmaster Tool is a no-charge web service by Google for webmasters.

It remains the best among top SEO tools and enables webmasters to check indexing status and help to optimize the visibility of their websites.

Features of Google Search Console

Check search queries that bring most of the visitors to your site.
Provides you the lists of internal links and links to your site.
It helps to submit the sitemap for better visibility.
Generate Robots.txt file.
Check and adjust the crawl rate and statistics about the crawling of your site by Google.

How to Use Google Search Console for Your Website?

To enable the GSC for your website you need to follow below the simple procedure.

Step 1: Go to your Google account and sign up for the new GSC account.
Step 2: After sign up click on ADD SITE and enter the URL of your website.

After adding your website, now it’s time to verify the ownership of the website. There are five ways by which you can verify your website.

Uploading an HTML file to your website.
Adding a meta tag to your website’s homepage.
By Google Analytics Account.
Using Google Tag Manager Account.
Through adding a DNS record to your domain.

Step 3: After verifying your ownership with the website you will reach the dashboard page.

In the dashboard, you can see the number of options. Now you can use it to improve your website performance in SERPs.

Google Webmaster Guide to Verify Your Website or Blog

Google webmaster tool allows you to examine the crawling and indexing status of your website or blog, including any errors that may be affecting it.

In this article, I will explain the step-by-step verification method for your website or blog using Google Search Console.

Beginners Guide to Setup Webmaster Tools (For Website)

Google search console is a website analysis tool that helps in analyzing the indexing, search performance and improvement areas in site with its resources.

So, with no more discussion, have a look on below easy steps to verify your website in Google webmaster tool;

Step 1: Simply visit Google webmaster tool page by clicking the following link https://www.google.com/webmasters/ and sign in with your any Gmail ID. See below snapshot;

Step 2: Enter your URL and click on continue. Before you go ahead, let me confirm you that,

If you have setup Google webmaster tool for any website or blog earlier, then it will land you directly on to the last step. Otherwise, it will show you the below;

Step 3: In next view, you will see 5 options there to verify your website, but I will narrate only 3 of them. Because all these top 3 are the easiest ways. See below;

Explore below the top 3 simplest ways to verify your website.

HTML File Upload Verification Method in GWT

By clicking on HTML file upload method, you will see below snapshot in which you have to download an HTML file and upload it on your website’s root server location as it is. After upload click on “Verify”.

Adding HTML Tag Verification Method in GWT

By clicking on add an HTML tag verification method, you’ll get below view mode in which you have to copy and paste the same verification meta tag code into your home page.

Make sure code should be placed just after starting the head tag <head>. After update, click on “Verify”.

Google Analytics Verification Method in GWT

Final 3rd verification method of using your Google analytics account, you need not to do anything with it. Just be sure that you have setup your Google analytics.

Then, make sure the tracking code has been placed in the head section of your website. You will see a message of successfully verified site after clicking on “Verify”.

Google Webmaster Guide to Verify Blogs

Till yet, it was for your website. Now it brings me here to guide you about verifying your external blogs on web 2.0 platforms.

So, again without wasting the time, let me make you understand a proper guide on same to get your web 2.0 blogs crawl and index with help of GWT or GSC.

Google Webmaster Guide to Verify WordPress Blog

If you want your website to rank well in search engines, you must add and verify it with Google.

Not only is this an important process, but it also adds value to your blog.

Google needs easy access to your posts to index them properly.

In your Google Search Console dashboard, there are multiple options available for verifying your blog.

The easiest method is to use the “Meta tag” in the alternative methods tab and select the HTML tag to get the code. Once you have the code, you can paste it into your WordPress website.

Alternatively, you can use the WordPress SEO plugin for an easy and fast way to verify your website with Google.

Simply paste your Google code into the plugin, and you’re done. Click here to learn more about this process.

Google Webmaster Guide to Verify Blogger

To verify your Blogger blog in Google Search Console, you first need to add it to your Search Console account.

You can do this by clicking on ‘Search Console’ under the ‘Tools and Resources’ section of the Blogger dashboard.

There are two ways to verify your site: by uploading an HTML file or by adding a meta tag to your blog’s template.

Additionally, submitting a sitemap is a great way to inform Google about the content on your site that may not be otherwise discovered.

Google prefers sitemaps created using the Sitemap protocol, but we accept several different formats.

If you need to publish an RSS or Atom feed of your site, you can submit the feed URL as a sitemap.

Google Webmaster Guide to Verify Tumblr Blog

The first thing you should do, to verify the tumbler blog, is to add your site to Google Search Console (GSC).

If you can’t use the domain verification method while adding your site to GSC, you can use the meta tag verification method. Grab the meta tag from GSC, go to the Tumblr dashboard, Edit HTML, and add the meta tag.

Tumblr automatically generates two types of XML sitemaps for your website.

Post Sitemap: It can be found at /sitemap1.xml
Page Site Map: It can be found at /sitemap-pages.xml

Now just take these two URLs and add them to the GSC or GWT. Looking for a fully described post about the same? Visit here.

Google Webmaster Guide to Verify Wix Site

For verifying your Wix Site you need to set up a Google Search Console account for your website and verify your website. In Google’s verification process you can choose to add a meta tag verification option and then copy and paste the code into the Wix Site Manager > SEO > More SEO Settings.

Once your Google search console account is verified, you can submit your website sitemap, in Wix, the sitemap can be found at your domain name: yourblog.wixsite.com/website/sitemap.xml.

Although, here is a detailed guide to verify your Wix site in Google search console. Try it now!

Search Console Guide to Verify Google Sites

Google Search Console is a powerful tool that allows you to manage your website’s presence in Google search results.

Using this tool, you can gain insights into your website’s traffic, such as how many people are visiting it and how they are finding it.

You can also see whether more users are visiting your site on a mobile device or desktop and which pages are the most popular.

In addition to these insights, Google Search Console helps you find and fix website errors, submit a sitemap, and create and check a robots.txt file.

Google Webmaster Guide to Verify Weebly Blog

Verifying your Weebly Blog with Google Webmaster Tools gives you access to different kind of statistic reports. If you want to take matters into your own hands further you can submit your site’s XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

For this, you have to set up and verify accounts for your website first. But after doing so you can go to add or submit a sitemap and simply tell them it’s at /sitemap.xml.

This will help you keep track of how many of your pages have been indexed by the search engines.

Google Webmaster Guide to Verify Strikingly Blog

Adding your Strikingly blog to the Search Console is fairly easy. You can start by logging into your Google Search Console account, enter your website’s URL and click Add Property and verify your website.

Once your site is verified, usually it takes a few hours before the data starts rolling in. On your Webmaster Tools dashboard, you’ll find three major tools.

The Overview page provides you a general report on everything – keywords you are ranking for, how much traffic your site gets, and the most popular pages on your website according to site traffic.

Performance provides you with a more detailed view of your blog performance. URL inspection provides you to look into a single URL on your website.

The Coverage tab in the search console provides you a report about your webpages.

If you want to know that Google is still indexing your site, this is the page you should be looking at. You’ll find reports on pages with error, valid with warnings, valid and excluded.

Google Webmaster Guide to Verify Yola Sites

Google Webmaster Search Console will help you to manage Google’s indexing of your yola site.

Yola has made it possible for you to get the advantage of Google Webmaster’s website optimization tools. Google Webmaster Tools is a program that used to help your website for indexing.

Once you’ve signed up and verified your account, you can submit your website and sitemap for review.

Google reviews your site; you can get helpful information within this dashboard that will allow you to further optimize your website.

Fundamental Aspects of Google Search Console

Here are the fundamental aspects of Google Search Console and how to use them. See below;

Display Search (Google Webmaster Guide)

Display search is a term used in search engine optimization that refers to optimizing your website for search engines to easily crawl and index it.

Structured Data

Structured data belongs to such components of a web page as price lists, reviews, and menus.

This information appears in the form of rich snippets and can be generated for these content types: people, products, music, recipes, reviews, businesses, and events.

Rich Card

You can use the rich card testing tool to determine if your data is structured properly for Google to create a rich snippet for your website.

HTML Improvements

The HTML improvements feature checks the metadata in the head section of your HTML, and it reports any duplicate title tags and meta descriptions, as well as whether they are too long or too short.

It also reports on non-indexable content.

Quick Mobile Pages

The AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) feature shows you the number of pages that are successfully indexed or have AMP-related errors that occurred when Google crawled the pages.

Search Traffic (Google Webmaster Guide for Beginners)

The Traffic section relates to exposures of your web pages to Google search engine users for specific keywords information on popular keywords being used for your type of website and also the details of impressions and clicks to visit your website.

Search Queries

Google search console offers you information related to the search queries that have resulted in the searcher being offered pages from your website.

In other words, the keywords or search terms used by Google users while searching for information online that resulted in your web pages being listed. Read in detail below;

Queries: It provides the total numbers of search queries that are most likely to show on your website.

Query List: It gives you a list of keywords used by users that resulted in your web pages that are being displayed at least once – sometimes twice if there are too many results. Data for the top 2,000 queries (keywords) are listed.

Impressions: It refers to the frequency of the pages from your website that appear in the SERPs, each time a link URL appears in a search result, it generates an impression.

Clicks: It tells you how often people clicked on your website in the search results of Google. It also tells about the performance of your page titles and meta descriptions.

CTR: The click-through rate is equal to Clicks divided by Impressions, multiplied by 100. If your post shows up in 20 searches and generates 10 clicks, then your CTR would be 50%.

Average Position: It tells you what the average ranking of a specific keyword or page was in the period you’ve selected. This position isn’t always reliable as more and more people seem to get different search results.

Links to Your Site

It lists all the web pages that are linking to your website (your backlinks). It also gives you information on which URLs are providing most links and the pages on your website that are receiving most links.

Internal Links

Internal links provide information about the pages on your website that are linked from other pages. This helps Google understand the relative importance of each page.

By organizing your internal linking structure, you can maximize the internal Page Rank of specific pages.

International Targeting

If your website has a generic top-level domain such as .com or .net, you can use this setting to indicate your preferred geographic targeting.

Google’s search rankings for each page can vary based on the country where the search results are displayed.

Mobile Utility

Due to the widespread use of smartphones, it is important to monitor and report on global traffic through mobile devices.

Studies have shown that visitors using mobile devices are more likely to revisit websites that are mobile-friendly.

Google Index (Search Console Guide for Beginners)

The ‘Google index’ section of GSC provides information on the index status associated with your website.

For example, it indicates the total number of pages indexed and the number of pages not selected for indexing due to duplicate content.

Index Status

The Index Status feature in Google Search Console informs you about the number of pages on your website that have been indexed by Google.

It provides data on the total number of pages that have been indexed, the number of pages that have ever been crawled, and the number of pages not selected for indexing because of duplicate content.

Additionally, it shows the number of pages that have been blocked by the robots.txt file.

Blocked Resources

Blocked Resources informs webmasters more insight into which images, CSS, JavaScript, and other resources are currently being blocked by Google.

Remove URLs

The Remove URLs tool helps you to temporarily block pages in your Search Console property from Google Search results.

Crawling (Google Webmaster Guide for Beginners)

The ‘Crawling’ section of Google search console provides information on any problems associated with your website.

Crawl Errors

The Crawl Errors provides you the details about the website URLs that Google could not successfully crawl or that returned an HTTP error code.

Crawl Stats

The crawl stats show you how often the pages of your website are crawled, how many kilobytes are downloaded per day, and what the download times of your website are.

Fetch as Google

This tool helps you to see your web pages as Google-bot sees it. If a spammer has added text to your source code that you cannot see on the page, you can find that by using this tool.

Sitemaps

A Sitemap is an XML file that lists all the pages on your website. It allows search engines to crawl the website more efficiently and to find URLs that may be isolated from the rest of the site’s content.

URL Parameters

You can use the ‘URL Parameters’ tool in GSC to include parameters that tell Google how to handle the alternative versions of a URL.

Conclusion: Google Webmaster Tools Guide

I hope this beginner’s guide to Google webmaster tools helped you to find out how to use Google search console in SEO practice for your website.

Well, there are currently nine ‘Other Resources’ on the Google Search Console as well and I am narrating the important ones below;

Structured Data Testing Tool: You can use this tool to test whether or not your data are structured sufficiently for Google to create a rich snippet.

Structured Data Markup Helper: This tool will help understand the site’s data and help you make the data more attractive manner that can be displayed in new ways.

Google My Business: You can have your business listed in the top positions for local searches by using Google places – a free of charge listing service.

Google Merchant Center: This is where you can upload data about your products so that it can be found by ‘Google Product search’ and other search services offered by Google.

Custom Search: This page in GSC gives you access to a customizable search box for your websites, and also for other sites and web pages.