Add and verify your site in Search Console, and give access to the right people.
Sign in to Google Search Console with the Google account your business uses and look for your website in the list of sites. If it is there and you didn't add it yourself, find out who owns it before you touch any settings. The owner decides who else gets in and what they can change.
Google Search Console is a free tool Google provides for people who run websites. Parts of it have come up earlier in the course. It reports how Google crawls your pages, indexes them and shows them in results. It also shows which searches lead people to your site and any problems Google has spotted. Google sends its warnings through it too, for example about manual actions or security issues, and those warnings only help if someone on your side reads them.
Priya has a website for her business. The first time she logged in to Search Console, she found she already had access. Three years earlier, her old web designer had set it up under his personal Google account and given her limited user permissions. He had since moved overseas, so no one could add people, change settings or open some of the reports. Getting full control back took her a week of emails. Her setup was the reverse of the right one, because an outsider's personal account held ownership when an account the business controls should have.
Every site you add to Search Console is a property. Google offers two kinds, and your choice changes what data you get.
A domain property takes in the whole domain, with all its subdomains and both the http and https versions. If your business used example.sg, one domain property would include www.example.sg and shop.example.sg together. That gives you the most complete view in one place. To verify it, you work in the domain's DNS settings, which are the records that control where your domain points. Search Console gives you a short line of text, and you add it as a record at the company where you bought or manage the domain. If you or a colleague can sign in to that company's account, this is usually straightforward. The new record can take a little time to take effect, so a check that fails straight away may pass later.
A URL-prefix property takes in only the addresses that start with the exact prefix you type, including the protocol. Set one up for https://www.example.sg and it covers pages under that address, while http://www.example.sg and shop.example.sg fall outside it. It covers less, but you have more ways to verify it. You can upload a small HTML file to the site, put an HTML tag into the homepage code, or connect a Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager account already running on the site. There are several other methods as well. Website builders often make the tag method easy with a box in the settings where you paste the code Search Console shows you.
If you can edit your DNS records, pick a domain property. It is the fuller option, and you won't lose data from a subdomain or an old http address. If you can't edit DNS, pick a URL-prefix property. This is common when your site sits on a platform that manages the domain and won't let you add records, or when the person who controls the domain is hard to reach. Type the prefix your site really uses. That is usually the https version, with or without www, depending on how your site is set up.
Having both kinds is fine. The domain property gives you the full picture, and a URL-prefix property is useful for looking at one section on its own.
There are two roles, owners and users. Owners have full control, which includes adding and removing other people. An owner is either a verified owner, someone who proved ownership themselves, or a delegated owner, someone a verified owner added. Users have either full or restricted permission. With full permission, a user sees all the data and can take some actions. With restricted permission, they see most of the data and can take fewer actions.
Make sure a verified owner is you or someone who will stay with the business, signed in with an account the business controls. Hardly anyone else needs to be an owner. Add teammates, freelancers and agencies as users at the lowest permission they need for their work. A person who only reads reports gets restricted access. An agency that will submit sitemaps and request indexing gets full access.
Remove a person's access when they leave or when an agency's contract ends. If that person is a verified owner, Google's help pages advise that you also remove the verification token they used, such as the HTML file or tag on your site. While it stays there, they may be able to verify again.
Keep a short written list of everyone with access and the reason they have it. Once Priya was back in control, she added a domain property for her site and verified it with a DNS record at her domain registrar. She made herself a verified owner on her business account and added her part-time assistant as a restricted user. She also removed the old designer, along with his verification file.
Set up Search Console as early as you can, ideally before you start on the fixes from earlier modules. Some reports take a few days to show data after a property is added. If Search Console is running from the start, you can see the effect of each change as it happens.
Now do the same for your own site, choosing the property type that matches the access you have, and write down who can see it. The activity below sets out what to record.
Verify your site as a domain property if you can edit DNS, or as a URL-prefix property if you can't. Then write down who has access.
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