The old Google Search Console seems to be holding on for dear life right now. There are only a handful of features left in the tool that remain, including Data Highlighter, International Targeting, Remove URLs, Crawl Stats, robots.txt Tester and URL Parameters. The rest are gone and replaced or mostly replaced in the new Google Search Console.
We knew this was coming and yesterday Google announced on Twitter that the day of reckoning was here.
As we announced in January, today we’re retiring another set of reports. If you didn’t check the new reports, please do, and let us know what you think - we’re committed to enhancing our product to support you better! Learn more at https://t.co/qTqHsLLIV3 pic.twitter.com/FMDGoaN9ea
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) March 28, 2019
With that, the Fetch as Google went away, despite most SEOs wanting to keep it Google dropped it. Google believes the URL Inspection tool fulfills enough of the features from the Fetch as Google tool. That tool did launch about ten years ago.
The "Fetch and Render" tool, Google's "Fetch as Google" tool is now officially gone as of today. pic.twitter.com/qDkHpIUz9g
— Bill Hartzer (@bhartzer) March 28, 2019
You can see that Google has been active in adding features to the Google Search Console and I suspect they will continue to do so until they can totally ditch the old version.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
