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Today, we're announcing that Site Kit is available for everyone to install from the WordPress plugin directory. Site Kit is Google's official WordPress plugin — it gives you insights on how people find and use your site, how to improve and monetize your content, with data from multiple Google tools. Learn more about Site Kit on the official Site Kit website.

Who is Site Kit for?


Site Kit makes it easy for WordPress site owners to understand how their site is doing and what to do next. As a WordPress site owner, Site Kit offers you:
  • Easy to verify site ownership through Search Console — no need to paste a code snippet on your site to prove you're an owner.
  • Convenient and easy access to relevant stats directly in your WordPress dashboard. We save you time — see the key information right when you sign in.
  • Cross-product insights — Google Search Console, Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, AdSense — are combined into a single, intuitive dashboard. We help you make informed decisions, quickly.
  • No source code editing. This is the easiest way to install and manage Google products on your site in just a few clicks.
If you are a developer or an agency working on WordPress sites for clients, Site Kit can make your life easier:
  • You’ll get aggregated insights from Google products, distilled in a dashboard that your clients or other teams can easily access. No need to copy data from multiple products to compile reports for clients.
  • The site performance stats and improvement recommendations come directly from Google — your customers will be getting the latest best practices recommended by Google products.
  • Site Kit provides roles and permissions to help you manage access to the site’s data and make sure only the relevant people can see stats from Google products.
If you work on a plugin or hosting provider, Site Kit provides a scalable, easy way for your users to provision and access key Google tools and metrics.
  • Easy connection to official Google tools. Your customers don’t have to edit the source code to set up Google tools.
  • Added value for your platform. Your customers get important information about how their site is performing right in your own dashboard.
  • Flexible UI. You can pull stats from the plugin dashboard and display stats natively in your platform’s UI.
Site Kit’s main dashboard helps you see the most important info about how your site is doing at a glance: how people are finding your site (traffic sources), your most popular pages, and what people search for to find your site. For more, check out the Find your way around Site Kit guide in our docs.

Get started with Site Kit

To get started, install the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory. Here are some recommendations on how you can make the most of Site Kit:
  • Review the main dashboard on a weekly basis and check for any significant changes in how people are finding your site. Are people finding your site from a new place?
  • Keep track of how your recent posts are doing by checking the individual page reports.
  • Compare the top performing pages and how people found them. Is a particular topic or product attracting more visitors from social channels?
  • Set up new Google services to get more interesting insights — for example, if you enable PageSpeed Insights and Analytics, you’ll be able to see whether page load time affects bounce rate.
If you are attending WordCamp US in Saint Louis, stop by to see a demo of Site Kit and talk to the team. We're also happy to answer your questions in the Site Kit support forum.
Posted by Mariya Moeva, Product Manager, Search and Content Ecosystem

We are happy to let you know that the Google Webmaster Conference is coming to Tel Aviv, Israel this winter!

If you are looking for an opportunity to socialize with the Search engineering team, or to hear from us what we’ve been working on, here is your chance! We’re planning lots of interesting content: John Mueller on Search, Andre Naumann on Trust & Safety, Daniel Waisberg on structured data, and many more speakers from the Search Console team.

The event will take place on December 4th, between 15:00 and 19:00 in the Google Tel Aviv offices. Learn more and apply for a spot at our website.



Get ready, and see you in Tel Aviv! And if you miss this one, don’t worry, we’ll have more events around the world next year. To be the first to learn about new locations, make sure to follow Google Webmasters on Twitter.

 Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate.

We are excited to introduce our newest video series: “Search For Beginners”! The series was created primarily to help new webmasters. It is also for anyone with an interest in Search or anyone who is still learning about the Web and how to manage their online presence.

We love to see the webmaster community grow! Every day, there are countless new webmasters who are taking the first steps in learning how Search works, and how to make their websites perform well and discoverable on Search. We understand that it sometimes can be challenging or even overwhelming to start with our existing content without some prior knowledge or basic understandings of the Web. We find our basic videos in our YouTube channels to be the ones with the most views. At the same time, advanced webmasters also see the need for content that can be sent to clients or stakeholders to help explain important concepts in managing an online presence.

We want to help all webmasters succeed, regardless of whether you have been managing websites for many years or you’ve just started out yesterday. We want to do more to help the new webmasters and this video series will hopefully help us achieve that.

Introduction to the series:

Episode 1:

The “Search For Beginners” video series covers basic online presence topics ranging from ‘Do you need a website?’, ‘What are the goals for your website?’ to more organic search-related topics such as ‘How does Google Search work?’, ‘How to change description line’, or ‘How to change wrong address information on Google’. Actually, we get asked these questions frequently in forums, social channels and at events around the world! The videos are fully animated. The videos are in English with subtitles available in Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, and English. We are working on more, so please stay tuned!

And if you consider yourself a more experienced user, please feel free to use these videos to support your pitches or explaining things to your clients. If you want to share any ideas or learnings, please leave them in the comment section in each video so that others can benefit from your knowledge and experience.

Follow us on Twitter and subscribe on YouTube for the upcoming videos! We will be adding new videos in this series to this playlist about every two weeks!

Posted by Cherry Prommawin, Search Quality Analyst
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"The end of an era"... that's the title Microsoft used to announce it will stop supporting Flash in their web browsers. Flash is disabled by default in Chrome (starting in version 76), Microsoft Edge, and FireFox 69. Soon, we'll also move on from Flash in indexing for Google Search.

Flash was the answer to the boring static web, with rich animations, media, and actions. It was a prolific technology that inspired many new content creators on the web. It was everywhere. The Flash runtime, which plays Flash content, was installed 500 million times in the second half of 2013.

I still remember my son playing endless number of Flash games until my wife yelled at him. It's time to go to bed, son. Hey Flash, it's your turn to go to bed.

Google Search will stop supporting Flash later this year. In Web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore the Flash content. Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files. Most users and websites won't see any impact from this change.

Flash, you inspired the web. Now, there are web standards like HTML5 to continue your legacy.

Jalgayo /tʃɑlˈgɑjɔ/ (goodbye in Korean), Flash.

Posted by Dong-Hwi Lee, engineering manager, Google

Video is an important and growing medium used to consume information online, and we want to make it as easy as possible for people to find useful and interesting videos on Google. Today, we’re introducing two new tools to help you understand your videos’ performance in Search and identify opportunities to improve your video markup.

There are three main ways people can see videos on Google Search today: on the main Search page; on the videos Search tab; and in Discover:

Left to right: Videos on the main search page; video search; and Discover.


Video Enhancement Report

Structured data can help search engines understand when videos appear on a page, so they can be displayed with a rich visual treatment, including accurate information on a video’s duration, upload date, and other metadata, as well as previews. This in turn helps users better understand what they’ll find in your video before they click.

A new report for “Videos” is now available in Search Console for sites that use structured data to annotate videos. The report allows you to see any errors and warnings for markup implemented on your site. When you fix an issue, you can use the report to validate if it was resolved by re-crawling your affected pages. Learn more about the rich result status reports.


Video Appearances in Performance Report

The Search Console performance report already includes an option to see the performance of your video tab search results (type = video). We are excited to share that we’ve extended our support for videos, so you can now also see the performance of your videos in the main Search results tab (type = web) and in Discover using the new “Videos” appearance. Content can appear with the video appearance if your page uses VideoObject structured data, or if Google uses other signals to detect that there is a video on the page.



These new tools should make it easier to understand how your videos perform on Search and to identify and fix video issues. We also recommend you follow these video best practices. If you have any questions, be sure to post in our forum.

Posted by Danielle Marshak, Product Manager

Googlebot uses a Chrome-based browser to render webpages, as we announced at Google I/O earlier this year. As part of this, in December 2019 we'll update Googlebot's user agent strings to reflect the new browser version, and periodically update the version numbers to match Chrome updates in Googlebot.

See Google crawlers (user agents) and Make sure Google can index JavaScript for background reading about user agent strings and rendering.
Googlebot user agents today
Mobile:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Desktop:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

OR

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Safari/537.36

 The new evergreen Googlebot and its user agent
In December we'll start periodically updating the above user agent strings to reflect the version of Chrome used in Googlebot. In the following user agent strings, "W.X.Y.Z" will be substituted with the Chrome version we're using. For example, instead of W.X.Y.Z you'll see something similar to "76.0.3809.100". This version number will update on a regular basis.

Mobile:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Desktop:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

OR

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36

 How to test your site

We've run an evaluation, so are confident that most websites will not be affected by the change.
Sites that follow our recommendations to use feature detection and progressive enhancement instead of user agent sniffing should continue to work without any changes.

If your site looks for a specific user agent, it may be affected. You should use feature detection instead of user agent sniffing. If you cannot use feature detection and need to detect Googlebot via the user agent, then look for "Googlebot" within the user agent.

Some common issues we saw while evaluating this change include:

  • Pages that present an error message instead of normal page contents. For example, a page may assume Googlebot is a user with an ad-blocker, and accidentally prevent it from accessing page contents.
  • Pages that redirect to a roboted or noindex document.

If you're not sure if your site is affected or not, you can try loading your webpage in your browser using the new Googlebot user agent. These instructions show how to override your user agent in Chrome.

If you have any questions, be sure to reach out to our webmaster help community, join our webmaster office hours on YouTube or follow us on Twitter.
Posted by Zoe Clifford, Software Engineer in the Web Rendering Service team