With 2020 hanging above our heads much the same way that bricks don't, people start reflecting on what they achieved this year, what went wrong, and how they could improve. We're no different, but instead of choosing what went well or wrong ourselves, we picked the announcements on our @GoogleWMC Twitter account that users interacted with the most, and decided to reflect on those. 

We had launches that you appreciated a lot. For example, we announced at Google I/O that Googlebot is becoming evergreen, meaning that it's always going to use an up-to-date version of Chromium for rendering. We hope that this will make it easier for developers to create stunning, modern, and snappy JavaScript experiences, by tapping onto the power of over 1000 new features and interfaces that are now supported.

Speaking of robots, together with the original author of the Robots Exclusion Protocol, other search engines, and input from webmasters, we submitted an Internet Draft to the IETF in order to start standardizing the 25-year-old protocol. 

Like Twitter users, we also thought it's an exciting project which lays down the rules of crawling for good, although it doesn't change anything for most.

But we haven't stopped there with touching ancient protocols: we also rethought how we need to treat "nofollow" links to keep up with the evolution of the web. It was an announcement that seemed to be welcomed by most Twitter users, and for a good reason: having a "hint" model for rel="nofollow" may help us reward those who create high quality content more, by serving even better results to our users.

One of the most tweeted  – and also most humbling – moments this year was when we lost a part of our index, which caused Search Console to misbehave, and also had rendering failures roughly the same time. Since Google Search works like a well oiled machine most of the time, we didn't have processes to quickly communicate issues to those who should know about them: webmasters. Lacking a proper process and channel to communicate these issues was a mistake and we are still working hard to rectify it, however one thing is clear: we need to do more on the critical communication side of things. 

We do like to communicate, in general: we shoot videos, we go to conferences, big and small, where we reach thousands of webmasters and SEOs, and in 2019 we extended our reach with the Webmaster Conference, which landed in 35 locations around the world in 12 languages. Not to mention the weather reports on our YouTube channel.

We hope you had a fantastic year and the new year will bring you even more success. If you need help with the latter, you can follow our blogs, @googlewmc on Twitter, or you could join us at a Webmaster Conference near you!

Posted by John Mueller, Cheese Connoisseur, and Gary the house elf 

Today we are announcing the launch of Publisher Center to help publishers more easily manage their content across news products at Google. Publisher Center merges two existing tools, Google News Producer and Google News Publisher Center, improving their user experience and functionality.
Publisher Center’s new features include a simpler way to manage your publication’s identity, like updating light and dark theme logos. It also provides an easier way for those that own multiple publications to organize and switch between them, particularly with improved permission settings that make it easier to collaborate with colleagues. Additionally, publishers can now point to the URLs for their website’s sections instead of RSS to configure sections in Google News. Content for News will now come directly from the web, just as it does for Search.
Publisher Center launches today in the existing four languages of the previous tools (English, Spanish, French, and German) and will expand to more languages soon. Learn more here.
Posted by Eric Silva, Product Manager

People frequently come to Google Search looking to find information on the status of their packages. To make it easier to find, we have created a new package tracking feature that enables shipping companies to show people the status of their packages right on Search. Here’s an example of how this information may appear:

Through the package tracking Early Adopters Program, which is available in all countries, shipping companies can sign-up to participate in this feature and give feedback on how to improve it. To take part in the program, a carrier will need to provide a RESTful JSON or XML API that returns the package tracking information. We can work with you to reuse an existing API or setup a new one.

Interested in providing package tracking information to your customers? Please review the full eligibility requirements and fill out the interest form.

If you have any questions, let us know through the forum or on Twitter.
Posted by Allen Harvey, Product Manager

Search Console sends millions of messages every month. They’re our main way to let you know when your website has a new issue and to make you aware of updates and opportunities to improve your presence on Google.

To make working with messages more efficient in Search Console, we have been working to make messages an integral part of the product. As of today, messages will be available through a panel accessed easily by clicking the bell icon at the top of any page in Search Console. The main difference from the old interface is that now you’ll have access to your messages throughout the product, no need to leave your reports.

You’ll see a notification with the number of new messages on top of the bell icon, as shown below. Click it to see a panel with a list of messages for your site, you can mark one or more messages as read to clear the clutter.

Image: New Search Console Messages

We are also introducing a new way to make messages more actionable by categorizing them into several types, such as Coverage, Enhancement types, Performance, and others. This will make it easier for you to find information about a specific issue.

Image: Categories in Search Console messages

We are also introducing the capability for site owners to access all the messages sent to the site, even those that were previously sent, regardless of when they were verified and when the messages were sent. Now, when users gain access to a new site they can see messages the site have received in the past, which should help the new owners to understand the context for that property.

The message panel shows messages only from May 23, 2019 onward. Messages sent before that date can be viewed only in your personal email or in the legacy message list. Your old messages will be available in the old interface for the time being, you can find them under the “Legacy tools & reports” section in the sidebar.

We hope this new feature improves your workflow and puts all the information you need at your fingertips to make better and faster decisions. If you have any feedback please let us know through the forum or via Twitter.

Posted by Maya Mamo, Haymi Shalom & Yuval Kurtser, Search Console engineering team

The ecosystem around and in Google Search has continued to evolve since the first episode of Google Search News. With this video series, we aim to give regular updates on Google Search, in particular for SEOs, publishers, webmasters -- essentially anyone who's creating content with the goal of making it discoverable in search. 

In this episode, we cover:

• Site Kit, a WordPress plugin that makes it easier to connect a blog or website to a number of Google services, such as Search Console or Analytics. It's useful for anyone who has a WordPress site, or who makes them for others. 

• There have been a number of updates to Google Search Console, the free tool that gives you insights into how Google Search sees your website. There's a speed report, fresher data in the performance report, and more information about your videos.

• We've put on a number of Webmaster Conferences, including ones in Singapore, Bangkok, Jakarta, and a Product Summit version in Mountain View, California. There are more lined up this year, including Tokyo, Seoul, Busan, Gwangju, Tel Aviv, Osaka, Daegu, and Zurich. We plan to do more of these next year, so perhaps we'll see you there.

• On YouTube, we launched a series for beginner site owners, all about Google Search.

• There are now more options available for your site's previews in Google Search. If you've added other meta tags to your pages, then these will be similar, if you want to use them.

• And finally, we've decided to retire Flash in indexing for Google Search. Flash has helped to bring rich & interactive experiences to the web, leading to it being possible directly in HTML and JavaScript. 

We hope you find these updates useful! Let us know in the video comments if there's something we can improve on.

Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Switzerland

We recently announced that in addition to schema.org markup, product data feeds submitted through Google Merchant Center and Google Manufacturer Center will be used to enrich Google Search shopping journeys. Today, we are announcing a new Search Appearance in the Search Console Performance report, which captures search stats for Product rich results on Google Search.

People come to Google to discover, research, and decide which products and brands to purchase. In order to provide helpful product information to shoppers, Google shows rich product data like product descriptions, price and availability within the search results.

Image: Rich product information on Google Search results

Website owners need to understand the impact of these rich results. The Google Search Console Performance report provides key metrics like clicks and impressions to help webmasters understand and optimize the performance of their website results on Google Search. These metrics can further be segmented by device, geography and queries.

If your website is eligible to appear on Product search results, you’ll find a new Search Appearance type called “Product results”, with which you can segment your traffic to analyze your search performance.

Image: Search Appearance of “Product results”

The new ‘Product results’ search appearance (shown in the screenshot above) will help website owners understand their search performance for product rich results. For example, they’ll be able to answer the following questions:

• How much traffic comes from experiences with rich data like price, availability?
• How does shopping traffic change over time, and for what shopping search queries is the website shown?

If you have any questions on this (or other) Search Console reports, let us know through the forum or on Twitter.

Posted by Siddhartha Garg, Product Manager

A fast web experience has long been an important user experience factor that we have promoted and advocated for. To help site owners on this quest we showed a preview of the Speed report in Search Console at Google I/O 2019. Since then, we've been iterating on all the great feedback from the beta testers and, starting today, are excited to begin public rollout!

Discovering potential user experience problems can be hard, especially on sites with many pages. To help site owners, the Speed report automatically assigns groups of similar URLs into "Fast", "Moderate", and "Slow" buckets. The data is based on the Chrome User Experience Report, which provides user experience metrics for how real-world Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web.

Image: Speed report overview

The report classifies URLs by speed and the issue that causes any slowdowns. Drill down on a specific issue to see examples of slow URLs to help you prioritize performance improvements for them. To get a better sense of what type of optimization can be performed for a specific URL, the report links to the Page Speed Insight tool, which provides information on specific optimization opportunities.

You should use this report both for monitoring your performance over time and for tracking fixes you made to your website. If you fix an issue, use the report to track whether users experienced a performance improvement when browsing the fixed version of your website.

To help you understand how your site is performing, you can also see what types of URLs are doing better by checking the moderate and fast buckets.

Image: URLs in the fast bucket

This new report is classified as "experimental" as we plan to continue to iterate and improve the metrics and recommendations for site owners. We will monitor feedback submitted directly through the report and in the user forum to ensure that it is useful and helpful, so please let us know how we are doing.

Posted By Sion Schori & Amir Rachum, Software Engineers