I reported on Friday that Google will be deprecating some or all of the old Search Console features so they can focus more on the new Google Search Console. Well, Google made it official by posting a blog post on the news on the Google Webmaster Blog.
Most of what I wrote on Friday was accurate - but let me recap here so you know what is going on.
- Google hopes to begin closing some of the old features in the old Search Console by March 2019.
- Crawl errors report and API are going away, Google says use the Index Coverage report.
- The old sitemaps report is going away, Google says use the new report in the new Google Search Console.
- Fetch as Google is going away, Google says use the URL inspection tool.
- User management is going away, Google says use "Settings" in the new Search Console.
- Structured data dashboard is going away, Google's new Search Console has other reports to get you most of this data.
- HTML suggestions is going away without a replacement.
- Property Sets is going away without an announced replacement, but we suspect Google is working on something like domain property
- Android Apps features are going away, instead Google says use Firebase.
- Blocked resources report is going away, again Google says use the URL inspection tool
The disavow tool is likely staying around, for now:
I believe it will be in the same location. It's somewhat hidden in GSC now (on purpose), but they aren't removing the tool. @JohnMu Do you have any info for Manuel about that?
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 25, 2019
AFAIK we're not removing that (at least not for the moment).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) January 25, 2019
Google is still working on a property sets solution:
We're looking at new ways to handle that kind of situation in the new Search Console, but property sets as they exist now are going away. Sorry!
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) January 28, 2019
So here we go - are you ready to let go of the old Google Search Console? Make sure to review this Google help doc to compare the two.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
