Your fast pass through security

Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 4:08 PM

Webmaster level: All

Security checks are nobody's cup of tea. We've never seen people go through airport baggage checks for fun. But while security measures are often necessary, that doesn't mean they have to be painful. In that spirit, we’ve implemented several major improvements to make the Google Site Verification process faster, more straightforward, and perhaps even a pleasure to use—so you can get on with the tasks that matter to you.

New verification method recommendations


You’ll quickly notice the changes we’ve made to the verification page, namely the new tabbed interface. These tabs allow us to give greater visibility to the verification method that we think will be most useful to you, which is listed in the Recommended Method tab.


Our recommendation is just an educated guess, but sometimes guesses can be wrong. It’s possible that the method we recommend might not work for you. If this is the case, simply click the "Alternate methods" tab to see the other verification methods that are available. Verifying with an alternate method is just as powerful as verifying with a recommended method.

Our recommendations are computed from statistical data taken from users with a similar configuration to yours. For example, we can guess which verification methods might be successful by looking at the public hosting information for your website. In the future we plan to add more signals so that we can provide additional customized instructions along with more relevant recommendations.

New Google Sites Are Automatically Verified
For some of you, we’ve made the process even more effortless—Google Sites administrators are now automatically verified for all new sites that they create. When you create a new Google Site, it’ll appear verified in the details page. The same goes for adding or removing owners: when you edit the owners list in your Google Site's settings, the changes will automatically appear in Webmaster Tools.

One thing to note is that we’re unable to automatically verify preexisting Google Sites at this time. If you’d like to verify your older Google Sites, please continue to use the meta tag method already available.

We hope these enhancements help get you through security even faster. Should you get pulled over and have any questions, feel free to check out our Webmaster Help Forums.


Written by Kevin Marshall, Konstantin Roslyakov, Ian Porteous (Software Engineers)