Google recommends verifying all versions of a website -- http, https, www, and non-www -- in order to get the most comprehensive view of your site in Google Search Console. Unfortunately, many separate listings can make it hard for webmasters to understand the full picture of how Google “sees” their domain as a whole. To make this easier, today we're announcing "domain properties" in Search Console, a way of verifying and seeing the data from Google Search for a whole domain.

Domain properties show data for all URLs under the domain name, including all protocols, subdomains, and paths. They give you a complete view of your website across Search Console, reducing the need to manually combine data. So regardless of whether you use m-dot URLs for mobile pages, or are (finally) getting the migration to HTTPS set up, Search Console will be able to help with a complete view of your site's data with regards to how Google Search sees it.

If you already have DNS verification set up, Search Console will automatically create new domain properties for you over the next few weeks, with data over all reports. Otherwise, to add a new domain property, go to the property selector, add a new domain property, and use DNS verification.We recommend using domain properties where possible going forward.

Domain properties were built based on your feedback; thank you again for everything you've sent our way over the years! We hope this makes it easier to manage your site, and to get a complete overview without having to manually combine data. Should you have any questions, feel free to drop by our help forums, or leave us a comment on Twitter. And as always, you can also use the feedback feature built in to Search Console as well.

Posted by Erez Bixon, Search Console Team

People come to Google to discover new brands and products throughout their shopping journey. On Search and Google Images, shoppers are provided with rich snippets like product description, ratings, and price to help guide purchase decisions.

Connecting potential customers with up-to-date and accurate product information is key to successful shopping journeys on Google, so today, we’re introducing new ways for merchants to provide this information to improve results for shoppers.

1. Search Console

   Many retailers and brands add structured data markup to their websites to ensure Google understands the products they sell. A new report for ‘Products’ is now available in Search Console for sites that use schema.org structured data markup to annotate product information. The report allows you to see any pending issues for markup on your site. Once an issue is fixed, you can use the report to validate if your issues were resolved by re-crawling your affected pages. Learn more about the rich result status reports

2. Merchant Center

   While structured data markup helps Google properly display your product information when we crawl your site, we are expanding capabilities for all retailers to directly provide up-to-date product information to Google in real-time. Product data feeds uploaded to Google Merchant Center will now be eligible for display in results on surfaces like Search and Google Images. This product information will be ranked based only on relevance to users’ queries, and no payment is required or accepted for eligibility. We’re starting with the expansion in the US, and support for other countries will be announced later in the year.

   Get started

   You don’t need a Google Ads campaign to participate. If you don’t have an existing account and sell your products in the US, create a Merchant Center account and upload a product data feed.

3. Manufacturer Center

   We’re also rolling out new features to improve your brand’s visibility and help customers find your products on Google by providing authoritative and up-to-date product information through Google Manufacturer Center. This information includes product description, variants, and rich content, such as high-quality images and videos that can show on the product’s knowledge panel.

These solutions give you multiple options to better reach and inform potential customers about your products as they shop across Google.

If you have any questions, be sure to post in our forum.

Posted by Bernhard Schindlholzer, Product Manager for Google Merchant Tools

In Search Console, the Performance report currently credits all page metrics to the exact URL that the user is referred to by Google Search. Although this provides very specific data, it makes property management more difficult; for example: if your site has mobile and desktop versions on different properties, you must open multiple properties to see all your Search data for the same piece of content.

To help unify your data, Search Console will soon begin assigning search metrics to the (Google-selected) canonical URL, rather than the URL referred to by Google Search. This change has several benefits:

• It unifies all search metrics for a single piece of content into a single URL: the canonical URL. This shows you the full picture about a specific piece of content in one property.
• For users with separate mobile or AMP pages, it unifies all (or most, since some mobile URLs may end up as canonical) of your data to a single property (the "canonical" property).
• It improves the usability of the AMP and Mobile-Friendly reports. These reports currently show issues in the canonical page property, but show the impression in the property that owns the actual URL referred to by Google Search. After this change, the impressions and issues will be shown in the same property.

When will this happen?

We plan to transition all performance data on April 10, 2019. In order to provide continuity to your data, we will pre-populate your unified data beginning from January 2018. We will also enable you to view both old and new versions for a few weeks during the transition to see the impact and understand the differences.

API and Data Studio users: The Search Console API will change to canonical data on April 10, 2019.

How will this affect my data?

• At an individual URL level, you will see traffic shift from any non-canonical (duplicate) URLs to the canonical URL.
• At the property level, you will see data from your alternate property (for example, your mobile site) shifted to your "canonical property". Your alternate property traffic probably won't drop to zero in Search Console because canonicalization is at the page, not the property level, and your mobile property might have some canonical pages. However, for most users, most property-level data will shift to one property. AMP property traffic will drop to zero in most cases (except for self-canonical pages).
• You will still be able to filter data by device, search appearance (such as AMP), country, and other dimensions without losing important information about your traffic.

You can see some examples of these traffic changes below.

Preparing for the change

• Consider whether you need to change user access to your various properties; for example: do you need to add new users to your canonical property, or do existing users continue to need access to the non-canonical properties.
• Modify any custom traffic reports you might have created in order to adapt for this traffic shift.
• If you need to learn the canonical URL for a given URL, you can use the URL Inspection tool.
• If you want to save your traffic data calculated using the current system, you should download your data using either the Performance report's Export Data button, or using the Search Console API.

Examples

Here are a few examples showing how data might change on your site. In these examples, you can see how your traffic numbers would change between a canonical site (called example.com) and alternate site (called m.example.com).

Important: In these examples, the desktop site contains all the canonical pages and the mobile contains all the alternate pages. In the real world, your desktop site might contain some alternate pages and your mobile site might contain some canonical pages. You can determine the canonical for a given URL using the URL Inspection tool.

Total traffic

In the current version, some of your traffic is attributed to the canonical property and some to the alternate property. The new version should attribute all of your traffic to the canonical property.

	Canonical property (http://example.com)	Alternate property (http://m.example.com)
Current
New, based on canonical URLs
Change	+0.7K     |        +3K	-0.7K        |          -3K

Individual page traffic

You can see traffic changes between the duplicate and canonical URLs for individual pages in the Pages view. The next example shows how traffic that used to be split between the canonical and alternate pages are now all attributed to the canonical URL:

	Canonical property (http://example.com)	Alternate property (http://m.example.com)
Old
New
Change	+150     |        +800	-150     |        -800

Mobile traffic

In the current version, all of your mobile traffic was attributed to your m. property. The new version attributes all traffic to your canonical property when you apply the "Device: Mobile" filter as shown here:

	Canonical property (http://example.com)	Alternate property (http://m.example.com)
Old
New
Change	+0.7K      | +3K	-0.7K      | -3K

In conclusion

We know that this change might seem a little confusing at first, but we're confident that it will simplify your job of tracking traffic data for your site. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out on the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by John Mueller, Developer Advocate, Zurich