Yesterday, Google announced on their Webmaster Central blog that they have released a beta version of their very own publisher plugin for WordPress which, for webmasters using the platform, will offer the functionality to utilise a range of their services straight from the dashboard. Of course, to many, this isn’t a surprise as Matt Cutts has previously suggested that, as far as they are concerned, WordPress is the most search engine friendly system to develop a site in and is their suggested platform to utilise for development.
For many, this has been a long time coming and it’s a surprise that Google hasn’t developed and released their own WordPress plugin sooner, with almost 20% of the top 10 million websites using the platform as of last August. In terms of what the plugin, current released as a beta version, offers, however, you’ll currently find support for:
- Google AdSense
- Google Webmaster Tools
The plugin will link automatically to your AdSense account and make it far easier than ever before for webmasters to implement ads on their site. If you’re running a blog and aren’t currently running AdSense, why not? You could be missing out on a nice little income, especially if you get decent volumes of traffic! Of course, it’s great to see Google finally offering an easy solution for WordPress and we’re sure that this will become a heavily used feature of the plugin over the coming months!
The second feature currently available in Google’s new plugin is the ability to verify your site with Webmaster Tools in just one click! Whilst this has been possible through various third party plugins for a while, it makes sense to keep everything within Google and it’s great that the support is finally there!
If you’re wanting to try out the plugin for yourself, it’s available now as a download in the WordPress Plugin Directory and there’s also a page on Google’s Help Centre if you’re having any problems with it!
Here at www.c4bmedia.com, we’ll certainly be trying out the plugin ourselves over the next few days and can’t wait to see what the future brings for it! Hopefully, we’ll see analytics integrated next and going forwards, who knows what else will be rolled out into it!