SEO with Multiple Google Webmaster Tools Accounts

Don’t ask me how this happened, but I had a customer operating and measuring their SEO effort using multiple Google Webmaster Accounts.

How and when this happened, no one truly knows. But today, I’ll best guess how this confusion occurred.

For the last 11 months, I’ve consulted and performed various SEO tasks for a customer. We’ve used heavily used Google Webmaster Tools to gauge SEO progress related to their efforts and my SEO Audit efforts.

Imagine the shock when I found out that we were not looking at the same webmaster accounts yet viewing 3 separate accounts for their domain.

Yes, it happened, and my hope is that this post can prevent it from happening to your website.

It goes without saying that anytime you have a professional or agency of any sort dealing with your website, it’s best to bring all parties to the table for a meeting of the minds.

Everyone needs to be on the same page and have the same expectations when it comes to performing various tasks on the website.

And in the case of SEO, this is truly a case where you want the right hand to know what the left hand is doing and vice versa. In this customer’s case, it did not happen this way.

For the longest time, I’ve managed this customer’s website and SEO efforts.

But as time progressed, the customer took it upon themselves to bring in other parties here and there based on the recommendations of personal friends and various professional connections.

And here is where things get weird and confusing.

The customer hired or negotiated a working relationship with an individual who possibly created a new Google Webmaster Tools account to measure their tasks.

In addition, the customer also engaged with a few SEO and web design agencies, yet it’s not clear that they were at fault.

Regardless of who created the additional Google Webmaster Tools account, it should not have been created without contacting and asking the current overseer or webmaster of the website.

Now I could easily fault both the customer and the person involved for not asking whether a Google Webmaster Tools account existed.

Before creating the new webmaster account, both parties could have easily identified and verified the existing webmaster tools account by looking at the head in the source code and noticing the Google-site-verification meta tag.

<meta name="google-site-verification" content="LongAlphaNumericString" />

In addition, both parties could have checked the website’s root directory for HTML file upload or even checked the domain name provider to see if a TXT record existed. They could have also used Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager to verify the webmaster tools account.

SEOing with Multiple Google Webmaster Tools Accounts

But neither party elected to do so, and the person created a second account for the same domain that already had an existing account, going undetected for quite some time.

You may be wondering how such a thing could go undetected for so long. Well, I’m glad you asked or at least share the thought.

Little did I realize, but my original webmaster account for the customer was verified using the Google-site-verification meta tag while the other party had used the TXT method.

Both accounts were able to be verified by Google because they both met the criteria of having their respective tags associated with the domain.

In my humble opinion, this is where I think that Google Webmaster Tools should have alerted both parties involved, myself and the other person, that our website is registered with 2 different accounts. But this alert did not happen.

I found the domain registered with 2 different Google Webmaster Tools accounts.

Inadvertently, the customer and I figured out when the customer was trying to explain that there were two listings for their website in their webmaster account.

There was a website registration for the non-www. (e.g., domain.com) and www. (e.g., www.domain.com) versions in their webmaster tools account. I was a bit baffled by their statement as I only saw one www. registration in my webmaster account.

So, as I usually do when customers attempt to explain things to me, I fired up a GoToMeeting and had the customer walk me through how they arrived at non-www. and www. versions in their webmaster tools account.

And to my surprise, there they were, present as ever, both the non-www. and www. versions.

Seeing my account and their account really baffled me and allowed the fog to begin to clear. This customer’s SEO has greatly suffered over the last year or so.

One may think that having multiple Google Webmaster Tools accounts may be one reason why traffic greatly suffers.  I personally don’t believe so.  It would be a minor consideration if it were by a long shot.

The interesting thing about each instance is that they all showed different data regarding search queries, search impressions, sitemaps, crawl errors, etc. Nothing matched at any given point throughout reviewing each metric and its respective data.

After identifying multiple accounts, I instructed the customer that we eliminate unneeded instances of their website.

Long story short, we removed my original account and the non-www. version of their website. All is well and happily verified for the time being.

Over a week after identifying this gaping mistake, I’ve noticed a positive change in their website metrics regarding queries, impressions, submission of a sitemap, and crawl indicators.

In the midst of straightening out their duplicate webmaster tools account, we’ve also migrated their website from a manual website to a WordPress website.

In closing, we’ll keep an eye on their SEO metrics in the coming weeks and months. When we do, we’ll be doing so from one webmaster tools account and not multiple webmaster tools accounts.

 

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Written by Alvin Brown
He's an experienced and passionate serial entrepreneur, founder and publisher of Kickstart Commerce. Alvin possesses a great love for startups dominating their market using profitable digital strategies for greater commerce.