Webmaster Tools and Search Console: what a business owner should actually check

Why a business owner should bother with Webmaster Tools

You pay for a website, for SEO, or for search ads. But if Yandex does not see half your pages or Google flags your site as unsafe, that money goes nowhere. Webmaster Tools and Search Console show you the technical state of your site from the search engine's point of view.

This is not a replacement for analytics. Google Analytics or similar tools tell you how many people came and what they did. Webmaster Tools tell you whether the search engine can see your pages, whether it finds errors on them, whether there are indexing problems. If there are problems, you find out here, not when traffic drops in half.

Setting up takes fifteen minutes. You need an account, access to the site admin panel or hosting. Then you confirm ownership - either through a meta tag in the code, an HTML file on the server, or a DNS record. If you do not know how, ask whoever built the site. This is standard work, not something complicated.

Indexing: how many pages the search engine sees

The first thing to check is how many pages made it into the index. This number shows how many of your site's pages the search engine considers worth showing in results. If your site has 50 pages but only 12 are indexed, the rest are either not found, blocked, or the search engine decided they are useless.

In Yandex Webmaster this is the Indexing section - Pages in Search. In Search Console it is Coverage or Page Indexing. You will see a graph and a table with statuses: how many pages are indexed, how many are excluded, how many have errors.

If the number of indexed pages drops sharply, that is a signal. Either the pages became unavailable (server down, hosting blocked access), or someone accidentally closed the whole site in robots.txt, or there is a mass error in the code. This needs to be fixed immediately, because without indexing your site does not exist in search.

Crawl errors and 404s

Webmaster Tools show pages where the search engine hit an error. The most common are 404 (page not found), 500 (server error), unavailability due to timeout. If there are dozens of these errors, that is a problem.

One or two 404s on old pages is normal. But if Search Console shows a hundred broken links, there are probably incorrect internal links somewhere on the site or someone deleted a section without setting up redirects. Visitors hit dead ends on those links too, and that means lost leads.

500 or 503 errors mean the server could not handle the request or was down when the search engine tried to access the page. If it is a one-time glitch, no big deal. If errors happen regularly, the problem is with the hosting or the site code - that is a job for a developer.

In Yandex Webmaster, crawl errors are in the Diagnostics section - Site Issues. In Search Console it is the Coverage block with a filter for Error status. You will see a list of URLs and error codes. If you do not understand what it means, send the list to whoever built the site.

Load speed and mobile version

A slow site loses visitors before they see the first screen. Google openly says that load speed affects search rankings. Yandex is quiet about it, but also takes it into account.

Search Console has a Core Web Vitals section - it shows how many pages load fast, how many load slowly, how many do not load properly at all. If most pages are in the red zone, that is a problem. People leave without waiting for the page to load, and the search engine sees it.

The mobile version is a separate story. More than half of traffic comes from phones. If the site does not open properly on mobile or the text is unreadable without zooming, Google lowers the site in mobile search. In Search Console this is the Mobile Usability section. If there are errors there, the layout needs to be fixed.

Yandex Webmaster also checks speed, but less thoroughly. There is Diagnostics - Page Load Speed. If the indicator is red or orange, it is worth looking into: maybe the site has huge uncompressed images or slow hosting.

Search queries and positions

Both tools show which queries people use to find your site and what positions it holds. This is not the full picture, but enough to understand whether SEO is working.

In Yandex Webmaster this is Search Queries. A list of phrases, impressions, clicks, CTR and average position. If the position for a target query is 45 and there are zero impressions - the site is in the index, but nobody sees it. If the position is 3 but there are almost no clicks, the problem is the snippet: the title or description does not grab attention.

In Search Console the similar section is called Performance. Same data: queries, clicks, impressions, CTR, position. You can filter by country, device, search type. If you sell services in New York but traffic comes from overseas, something is wrong with geo-targeting.

This is not a tool for deep SEO analysis, but if you see that for queries critical to your business the site is on page three, it is time to change something. Either in the content, or in the technical side, or rethink the promotion strategy altogether.

Penalties, filters and security

Sometimes a site gets hit by a filter or penalty - Yandex or Google decide that something on the site violates the rules. This could be link manipulation, hidden text, malware, or just suspicious activity.

In Yandex Webmaster this is the Security and Violations section. If there is something there, it is serious. Either the site was hacked and malicious code was uploaded, or prohibited content was found, or Yandex suspects manipulation of search results. Without investigating and eliminating the cause, the site will be demoted or removed from search entirely.

Google acts more harshly. If Search Console shows Manual Actions or Security Issues, the site is either already demoted or blocked from results entirely. It will also say what the problem is. This is not something you can ignore.

If there are no penalties but traffic dropped, check the Manual Actions section in Search Console and Security in Webmaster. There may be a warning that has not yet turned into a penalty but already signals a problem.

Sitemap and robots.txt

A sitemap (sitemap.xml) is a file with a list of all pages that helps the search engine find them. If there is no sitemap or it is outdated, the search engine will index the site more slowly and may miss new pages.

Both tools have a section for uploading a sitemap. In Yandex Webmaster it is Indexing - Sitemap Files. In Search Console - Sitemaps. You upload a link to the file (usually site.com/sitemap.xml), and the search engine starts crawling it.

The robots.txt file controls which pages the search engine can crawl and which it cannot. If someone accidentally blocked the entire site with the line Disallow: /, the search engine will not index anything. This happens when a developer forgets to remove the restriction after testing.

You can check robots.txt in the Tools section - robots.txt Analysis in Webmaster or robots.txt Tester in Search Console. If there is a restriction blocking the entire site and the site is already live, this needs to be removed immediately.

What to do if you find a problem

If an error shows up in Webmaster Tools or Search Console, do not panic and do not try to fix it yourself if you do not understand what to do. Most problems are solved on the developer or hosting side.

Take a screenshot or copy the error text. Send it to whoever built the site with the question: what is this and how do we fix it. If the site was built a long time ago and there is no support, you can reach out to any web studio - these are standard tasks.

If the problem is with hosting (server unavailable, 500 errors, slow loading), contact hosting support. If they do not solve the issue or give you the runaround, that is a reason to switch hosting.

At EFIMOV DEV we regularly see situations like this: a client comes in with dropping traffic, we open Webmaster Tools, and half the site is not indexed because of a code error or incorrect robots.txt. We fix it, traffic comes back. If you have a similar story, we can help - reach out on Telegram @efimovdev or through the site efimovdev.ru.

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