Google Search Console

Google Search Console is Google's free tool for site owners. It reports how your site performs in Google search: which queries it appears for, at which positions, and how many impressions and clicks each page earns. Connecting it to RankYak is optional, but you should do it if you can, because it replaces assumptions about your site's rankings with real measurements. RankYak requests read-only access, so it can never change anything in your Search Console account.

Why you should connect

Keywords you already rank for. During keyword discovery, every keyword is checked against your site's actual search performance. When one of your existing pages already ranks for a keyword, RankYak marks the keyword as covered by that page and excludes it from the content plan, so a new article never ends up competing with a page you already have. This is how RankYak avoids keyword cannibalization, and the keyword overview shows it at work: such keywords display your existing page instead of an article.

Rank tracking. Your dashboard shows the impressions your site earned over the last 30 days, and each article records milestones as it gets indexed, gathers impressions and clicks, and climbs into top positions.

Automatic content optimizations. Your search performance is what RankYak picks an article to optimize by, and what guides the rewrite. Without a connection, a site never optimizes anything.

The audits. The Site Guard and the Cannibalization Guard are built on your search performance data, so both require the connection to run.

Better internal links. A verified property is also how RankYak knows the site is yours. Anyone may type any domain into a site, so without that proof RankYak reads only your sitemap and works from the words in each URL. With it, RankYak reads the pages themselves, which is what lets it link a new article to the pages it genuinely belongs next to.

Connecting

The setup flow offers to connect Search Console when you create a site. Of course, you may also connect at any later moment.

1. Go to Settings, then Integrations.
2. Click Connect on the Google Search Console card.
3. Sign in with the Google account that has access to your site's property, and allow read-only access.
4. Back in RankYak, select the site to connect and click Connect site.

Choosing the Search Console property

After you sign in, RankYak lists every property in your Search Console account and preselects the one covering your site's domain. A property identifier takes one of two shapes: a domain property such as sc-domain:example.com, or a URL-prefix property such as https://example.com/. Either works; what matters is that the property covers your site's domain, and RankYak warns you when the selected property does not, since data from another site would be inaccurate and the property would prove nothing about the site you are optimizing.

The two shapes cover different things, which matters when your site sits on a subdomain. A domain property covers the domain and every subdomain of it, so sc-domain:example.com covers a site on blog.example.com. A URL-prefix property covers the one host it names, so https://example.com/ does not. The www. prefix never matters on either side.

A property must be verified in Search Console before it can be connected. If the property you need carries a "Not verified" badge, or does not appear in the list at all, add and verify it in Google Search Console first, then click Refresh to pick it up.

Disconnecting

To disconnect, go to Settings, then Integrations, click Disconnect on the Google Search Console card, and confirm. RankYak removes its stored access immediately, ranking and traffic data stop updating from that moment on, the Site Guard and Cannibalization Guard can no longer run, and RankYak goes back to reading your sitemap rather than your pages; your keywords and articles are not affected. You may reconnect at any time by going through the Google sign-in again.