Easier management of website verifications

Thursday, March 21, 2013

To help webmasters manage the
verified
owners for their websites in
Webmaster Tools,
we’ve recently introduced three new features:

• Verification details view: You can now see the methods used to verify an
  owner for your site. In the Manage owners page for your site, you can now find the new
  Verification details link. This screenshot shows the verification details of a user who is
  verified using both an HTML file uploaded to the site and a meta tag:

  

  Where appropriate, the Verification details will have links to the correct URL on your site
  where the verification can be found to help you find it faster.

• Requiring the verification method be removed from the site before unverifying an
  owner: You now need to remove the verification method from your site before
  unverifying an owner
  from Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools now checks the method that the owner used to verify
  ownership of the site, and will show an error message if the verification is still found. For
  example, this is the error message shown when an unverification was attempted while the DNS
  CNAME verification method was still found on the DNS records of the domain:

  

• Shorter CNAME verification string: We’ve slightly modified the
  CNAME verification string to make it shorter to support a larger number of DNS
  providers. Some systems limit the number of characters that can be used in DNS records, which
  meant that some users were not able to use the
  CNAME verification method.
  We’ve now made the CNAME verification method have a fewer number of characters.
  Existing CNAME verifications will continue to be valid.

We hope this changes make it easier for you to use Webmaster Tools. As always, please post in our
Verification forum
if you have any questions or feedback.

Posted by
Pierre Far, Webmaster
Trends Analyst