Is Google happy with your site?

There are ways to check that Google is happy about your site and even to see some advice on how it may be better.

To demonstrate the use of it I will tell you of two short stories.

1. While checking Google Search, I found that it had a ‘page not found’ error. I was quite sure that page had not existed as given, so I traced back to find an article had been written but had left off part of the URL. I created a redirect to the page it really wanted to address and another 20-30 people each month were brought by that article to the site.
2. While checking another site, we found they had changed their Permalinks, but now 100’s of links to old URLs were now dead ones. This was losing them traffic and Google Search Authenticity. Correct this brought more people to the site and saw an improvement in their search rankings.

Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster)

Personally, I think a responsible domain owner should have control of this themselves or expect to see reports from their web designer/consultant. On this site, you can ‘register’ to Google as the one in control of the site and gain valuable feedback from Google if there are problems that hamper its ability to list you within Google search.

To register, you need to prove to Google the domain is yours. The most simple way is to upload a text file that they supply, which is unique to your site. Otherwise, you have the option to add a

Here are the steps that usually are taken below.

1. Add a Property – make sure you give the full URL that the site is using. eg https://wpbusinessclub.com
2. Upload the verification file using FTP/sFTP access.
   
3. Click on the confirm to see the file loaded.
4. Verify and Google with the check and confirm.
   

You are now the confirmed owner and any problems experienced by Google Search Bots checking your site will be reported to you.

The Most Common problems are broken links or missing content. Somebody could put a link on another site and then mistype the page on your site. You could delete a page for some reason and Google still has a reference to it.

Alternate methods.

If uploading files are not your preferred method, then there are other ways to confirm your control. The Two which suggest the best to me are;

1. Confirm using your Google Analytics Account
2. Add the meta tag into the home page.

Easy Minimalist Solution – How to add the HTML tag in the theme or a plugin

You can either use our most minimalist plugin to set this up for you or use the following code and put it in your theme’s functions.php (assuming you either use a child theme or have a theme specifically written for you.) You just need to edit the code to match the one requested by google for your site.

function wpbizclub_google_search_meta()
{ ?>
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="Y0Y-mWGR0M09yMGqnIPIIzGQMAi4p2LtGgSjLbSjkpo" />
<?php }
add_action( 'wp_head', 'wpbizclub_google_search_meta',1 );

You can download our simple plugin from here – Download Google-search-meta-minimalist. Again to keep minimalist, you will need to edit the google code to be yours. However, this can be done when uploaded if you have access to edit files on your WordPress site.

How the code works.