Sharing the Google Webmasters Tools love

Many people are familiar with google analytics, a free service from Google that provides traffic statistics. Fewer are familiar with google webmaster tools which is packed with all sorts of useful information about your site. Google webmaster tools gives you a number of hints on what to change or fix on your site to help it rank better, you can register sitemaps, see information on crawl information, and even on your site performance.

However up to now, it’s been a pain to help clients, especially the less technically knowledgeable ones, set up verified google webmaster tools access to their site. For every google account, you had to upload a file to the root directory or add a meta tag to the home page. Now, as long as you have one user is verified, that user can easily add additional verified users.

In a blog post, sharing the verification love, the webmaster central blog outlines how it is done. The one caveat is that the access is binary. Unlike google analytics you can’t give “read only” access.