Tuesday, November 29, 2016
In the early days—back when
Search Console
was still called Webmaster Tools—the content keywords feature was the only way to see what
Googlebot found when it crawled a website. It was useful to see that Google was able to crawl your
pages at all, or if your site was hacked.
In the meantime, you can easily check any page on your website and
see how Googlebot fetches
it immediately,
Search Analytics
shows you which keywords we’ve shown your site in search for, and Google informs you of many kinds
of hacks automatically. Additionally, users were often confused about the keywords listed in
content keywords. And so, the time has come to retire the Content Keywords feature in Search
Console.
The words on your pages, the keywords if you will, are still important for Google’s (and your
users’) understanding of your pages. While our systems have gotten better, they can’t read your
mind: be clear about what your site is about, and what you’d like to be found for. Tell visitors
what makes your site, your products and services, special!
What was your most surprising, or favorite, keyword shown? Let us know in the comments!
How we apply this
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
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