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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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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