Important features of Google Webmasters

For any digital marketer, or anyone interested in improving their business through their website should get familiar with Tool from Google known as “Google Webmasters”. Through this tool you can control the way your website looks / behaves in the Google search results.  Also, you can get data, use tools and perform diagnostics for your site. It also informs you how Google sees your site.

In this blog, we shall talk about some of the important features of Google Webmasters. So let’s get started

Post login into your Google web-masters account, on the left hand side you’ll see a lot of options provided by Webmasters.

In this article we’ll talk about:

• Structured Data
• Data Highlighter
• Sitelinks

Structured Data section

On the left hand side, you can see the all options provided by Google Webmasters to tweak your website presence in Google search results. On selecting option of Structured Data, Google will detect if any structured data is being captured on your account, if not then it shows the following error.

In my one of my earlier articles I have explained adding of structured data in detail One can add structured data about a company or a service, product , reviews etc.

Post your structured data on the website and check how Google sees your structured data content on website (as shown in the image below )

In the image below, 4 schemas are added .i.e. Organization, Webiste, JobPosting, Breadcrumb (marked in red rectangle)

On selecting any of these schemas, you’ll find further details. (See below image)
Here you can find out how Google has responded to the structured data that has been included in the source code of the website. One can validate what information has been assimilated by Google along with error details.

Data Highlighter:

This tool helps Google to understand various articles, events, Book reviews, movies, Local Business, Products, Restaurants, TV list episodes and other information that exists on your website. If you are movie listing website then only movies would be applicable.

This tool helps Google to understand content of your website beyond what exists on your website without changing any code.

Eg: If you own a restaurant in Mumbai, and if any person searches say “restaurant in Mumbai”, Google will identify the information through data highlighter and will show this data more prominently to user.

You can use Data Highlighting feature by selecting “Start Highlighting” and post selection of the URL of the website/Product/service/event/ etc

You can select the information that you want to highlight. Next you will have to select the text and tag it under categories such as Name, Image, Pricing, Product ID, Average Rating and, Review etc. 
Check the image below for reference. After tagging, you can see the how Google is mapping the data in the right side of the image.

After selecting the tag, publish the data by clicking on publish button on the top-right hand section. The results shall be displayed on Google search after next web crawl by Google.

SiteLinks:

Sitelinks are Google’s way to show more relevant results when user searches particularly for one company/ product / website.

In this case let us take the example of paytm.com. If a user searches for “paytm”, Google will display the following results page.

Google will infer that you are looking for Paytm’s website and so it shows most relevant pages of the site in the search results. Be default the top 6 landing pages of the website will be shown.

Through this sitelinks feature, you can manage the links that should be seen in Google results albeit in a limited fashion.

Through this feature, you can demote a link which is unnecessary. If for above example, discount coupons landing page is not necessary, you can remove the link by providing URL. Check the image below for reference.

Once demoted, Google pickups next most prominent webpage and displays that one. Here one can demote maximum of 100 pages. Any demoted link stays demoted for roughly 120 days. If user wants to demote beyond 120 days, he/she should repeat the procedure again. Through this feature, you can only control the links that are to be demoted, you cannot promote any sitelink.

These features should help any marketer to fine tune their SEO efforts.

If you have any doubts/questions do let me know through comments and I shall get back to you.