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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday July 12 2018, @03:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the next-gen-google-glasses dept.

Google's URL inspection tool now available for all users

You can access the tool within the new Google Search Console over here.

The URL inspection tool allows you to check a specific URL on your website to see the status of how Google search sees that URL. This tool "provides detailed crawl, index, and serving information about your pages, directly from the Google index," Google says. It will show the last crawl date, the status of that last crawl, any crawling or indexing errors and the canonical URL for that page. It will show if the page was successfully indexed, any AMP errors, structured data errors and indexing issues.

Seems like you need to log in to make it work.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by KritonK on Thursday July 12 2018, @08:25AM (2 children)

    by KritonK (465) on Thursday July 12 2018, @08:25AM (#706129)

    The linked page requires logging in with a google account, after which you are shown an empty page of "properties", where you can add new properties, which are URLs. If you try to add one, then you are told that if you proceed, you will be registered as the owner of that property, whatever that means. I suspect that this is google newspeak for being associated with said URL (e.g., like the site, use their services, or work for them). I didn't proceed further, but I assume that the google account, that I used, has already been associated with the URL that I typed, despite claims to the contrary.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @11:45AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @11:45AM (#706170)

      I went a little further and the next step was to prove that I had admin privileges for the new URL I tried to add. It offered several ways to prove this, the ones I remember involved adding a code snippet (supplied by Google) to the page at the URL...
      Lost interest quickly at that point!

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by darkfeline on Thursday July 12 2018, @07:46PM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Thursday July 12 2018, @07:46PM (#706327) Homepage

      This news isn't relevant for most people here. It's an SEO tool. If you own a website and you want to maximize "exposure", "ad hits", "clicks", "views", "ranking", etc, you can use this to check how Google indexes your website's pages.

      You wouldn't use this tool from a personal Google account, you would use this from a business Google account [1]. So "data collection", in the manner you suggested, isn't really an issue. Business owners already register their website with Google for SEO purposes and analytics and lots of other cool business-y features that managers are wont to sign large contracts for.

      As a side note, the contract terms for business Google accounts are VERY different from consumer accounts. You get what you pay for, quite literally.

      [1]: You could run your business using a personal Google account, but you risk your entire company getting shut down for some trivial problem, like that "Google shut down all our services" FUD that has been running around lately.

      --
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @02:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @02:25PM (#706209)

    It's just sad.

  • (Score: 2) by datapharmer on Thursday July 12 2018, @02:26PM

    by datapharmer (2702) on Thursday July 12 2018, @02:26PM (#706211)

    This has been around for years. Best as I can tell the only new thing about it is they they reintroduced the old feature to the “new” console design.

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