WordPress Plugin for Webmaster Tools verification

Webmaster Level: All

For webmasters with self-hosted WordPress blogs, there’s now a Webmaster Tools site verifcation plugin for Wordpress that completely automates our verification process! You can install it directly from the “Install Plugins” control panel built into your WordPress blog, or you can download the ZIP file from the WordPress plugin site. This plugin can only be used by self-hosted WordPress blogs; it can’t be installed on blogs hosted on wordpress.com.

With verified ownership of your site in Webmaster Tools, you can receive specific statistics and information (e.g. relevant search queries, malware notices) about your site directly from Google. For recent news about verification for other types of sites, please see our recent blog post, “Your fast pass through security.”


Written by Kevin Marshall, Software Engineer

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Introducing the Google Webmaster Team

We’re pleased to introduce the Google Webmaster Team as contributors to the Webmaster Central Blog. As the team responsible for tens of thousands of Google’s informational web pages, they’re here to offer tips and advice based on their experiences as hands-on webmasters.

Back in the 1990s, anyone who maintained a website called themselves a “webmaster” regardless of whether they were a designer, developer, author, system administrator, or someone who had just stumbled across GeoCities and created their first web page. As the technologies changed over the years, so did the roles and skills of those managing websites.

Around 20 years after the word was first used, we still refer to ourselves as the Google Webmaster Team because it’s the only term that really covers the wide variety of roles that we have on our team. Although most of us have solid knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other web technologies, we also have specialists in design, development, user experience, information architecture, system administration, and project management.

Part of the Google Webmaster Team, Mountain View

In contrast to the Google Webmaster Central Team—which mainly focuses on helping webmasters outside of Google understand web search and how things like crawling and indexing affect their sites—our team is responsible for designing, implementing, optimizing and maintaining Google’s corporate pages, informational product pages, landing pages for marketing campaigns, and our error page. Our team also develops internal tools to increase our productivity and help to maintain the thousands of HTML pages that we own.

We’re working hard to follow, challenge and evolve best practices and web standards to ensure that all our new pages are produced to the highest quality and provide the best user experience, and we’re constantly evaluating and updating our legacy pages to ensure their deprecated HTML isn’t just left to rot.

We want to share our work and experiences with other webmasters, so we recently launched our @GoogleWebTeam account on Twitter to keep our followers updated on the latest news about our projects, web standards, and anything else which may be of interest to other webmasters, web designers and web developers. We’ll be posting here on the Webmaster Central Blog when we want to share anything longer than 140 characters.

Before we share more details about our processes and experiences, please let us know if there’s anything you’d like us to specifically cover by leaving a comment here or by tweeting @GoogleWebTeam.

Posted by Tony Ruscoe, Google Webmaster Team

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Troubleshooting Instant Previews in Webmaster Tools

Webmaster level: All

In November, we launched Instant Previews to help users better understand if a particular result was relevant for a their search query. Since launch, our Instant Previews team has been keeping an eye on common complaints and problems related to how pages are rendered for Instant Previews.

When we see issues with preview images, they are frequently due to:

• Blocked resources due to a robots.txt entry
• Cloaking: Erroneous content being served to the Googlebot user-agent
• Poor alternative content when Flash is unavailable

To help webmasters diagnose these problems, we have a new Instant Preview tool in the Labs section of Webmaster Tools (in English only for now).

Here, you can input the URL of any page on your site. We will then fetch the page from your site and try to render it both as it would display in Chrome and through our Instant Preview renderer. Please keep in mind that both of these renders are done using a recent build of Webkit which does not include plugins such as Flash or Silverlight, so it's important to consider the value of providing alternative content for these situations. Alternative content can be helpful to search engines, and visitors to your site without the plugin would benefit as well.

Below the renders, you’ll also see automated feedback on problems our system can detect such as missing or roboted resources. And, in the future, we plan to add more informative and timely feedback to help improve your Instant Previews!

Please direct your questions and feedback to the Webmaster Forum.

Posted by Michael Darweesh, Software Engineer

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Pilot Webmaster Tools’ Search Queries data in Google Analytics

Webmaster Level: All



Webmasters have long been asking for better integration between Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. Today we’re happy to announce a limited pilot for Search Engine Optimization reports in Google Analytics, based on Search Queries data from Webmaster Tools.



In addition to including Search Queries data found in Webmaster Tools, these Search Engine Optimization reports also take advantage of Google Analytics’ advanced filtering and visualization capabilities for deeper data analysis. For example, you can filter for queries that had more than 100 clicks and see a chart for how much each of those queries contributed to your overall clicks from top queries.

To enable these Search Engine Optimization reports, you should sign up for the pilot and you must be both a Webmaster Tools verified site owner and a Google Analytics administrator. Each additional user who would like to view them also needs to individually sign up for the pilot.



Posted by Christina Chen & Torrey Hoffman, Webmaster Tools Team

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