Updated and legacy tools comparison
Search console reports and tools are ways to assess your website’s performance and create more organic visibility of the site’s information. Additionally, these tools allow anyone with a website, free of cost to monitor how Google views their site. When reading about the search console tools and reports and comparing them with the legacy tools and reports, the latter seem to be utilized by developers whereas the former appear to be more user friendly and have the ability to be used by the lay person. The search console reports and tools moreover seem to display not only performance results but a synopsis of the site’s overall health, including security issues, URL/HTML coding errors, statistics, usability, site links, mobile usability and overall validity. They seem, not only to be user friendly but pertain to today’s society. What I mean by that is, they assess how mobile friendly a site is, sends alerts when an issue on the site arises, while also providing a quick and easy way to get started. It seems as if these legacy tools and reports have yet to be updated due to the fact that their purposes are so advanced that it may be difficult to find a way for the commoner to be able to utilize a similar function, regardless.
Why are these important?
I think these tools are important because they allow you to have insight into the behind the scenes performance of the page. They also give you information about how to optimize better, rank better in the google search results and they keep you informed about problems that may arise so you can tackle them as soon as they arise. Schwartz (2019) praises the new Google search console in reporting that Google shows updated data form up to six hours prior, whereas the data from the older version, or the legacy version, took approximately three days to update. This significant improvement allows website owners to make optimization changes, fix/debug issues in a timelier manner, actually, within less than a day (Schwartz, 2019).
References
Schwartxz, B. (2019). Google search console speeds up data in performance reports. Search Engine Land. Data retrieved from https://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-speeds-up-data-in-performance-reports-322446