Search Console, the first account to open
Google provides, for free, the tool that tells you what it has indexed of your site, what it has set aside and why, and on which queries it shows it. Beginners' SEO series, part three.
The first two parts described what Google does with a site and why a page can go missing. That leaves a question of method: how do you know, instead of guessing? The answer exists, it is free, and it comes from Google itself: Search Console.
It is, quite precisely, the interface through which Google speaks to site owners. Nothing a consultant, a paid tool or a third-party dashboard will tell you about your indexing is more reliable than what this console displays, since the others can at best only observe it from the outside.
Proving the site is yours
When you open the account, Google asks for proof of ownership: adding a property means demonstrating that you control the domain, for instance by placing a record in its DNS configuration, or a file at its root. The operation is done once. If a provider manages your site, insist on owning the Search Console property yourself, and give them access: the day you change providers, the history follows you.
The three screens that matter for a beginner
URL inspection. You paste a page’s address, and the tool answers: indexed or not, when the crawler came by, what it saw, and what is blocking if anything. This is the screen that turns the four hypotheses of the previous part into a diagnosis. It also carries a “request indexing” button, which places the page in a crawl queue. That button is useful for a new or freshly corrected page; it forces nothing, and pressing it again on the same page achieves nothing.
Page indexing. The indexing report lists, for the whole site, what is indexed and what is not, reason by reason: discovered but not crawled, crawled but not indexed, excluded by noindex, redirected. Reading this report once a month is enough to spot accidents before they cost you.
Performance. The queries on which the site appeared, the number of impressions, of clicks, the average position. It is the only direct source for knowing what people actually type when Google shows them your pages, and it is often a surprise.
What the console does not do
It changes nothing on your site: it is a measuring instrument, not a lever. It shows only Google, not the other engines. And its figures arrive with a delay of a day or two. Finally, a calendar point: the console only has data from the moment the property exists. That is the decisive argument for opening it on launch day, before you even think about the rest: every week without the console is a week of measurements lost forever.
Next part: the sitemap, what it really declares to Google, and what it gets wrongly credited with.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.