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