User Administration added to Google’s Webmaster Tools

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/39010655[/vimeo]Google’s Webmaster Tools recently introduced a User Administration panel to allow site owners the ability to give rights to others to view their information.  The following is a transcript of the video above regarding this new Webmaster Tools functionality.

“Hi everybody, this is Steve Scott from the Search Engine Academy.  I run the SEO Training academy out of the Tampa, Florida area and I am very excited to be here for the first of our video blogs.

We received some really exciting news today from Google (it’s the 6^th of March 2012) and they have finally given Webmaster Tools users something they’ve been clamoring for for some time now… and that is the ability to have a user administration function within Webmaster Tools.

For a long time we’ve wanted to the ability to give other people access to Webmaster Tools.  Many times if I’m working with a new client or prospect, I may ask them to give me access to their Webmaster Tools so I can review it.  Now, they’ve got a really easy way to do that including different levels of permissions.

All you have to do is go into your Google Webmaster Tools account.  If you are already a verified user of your Webmaster Tools account, just click on the Site Configuration option and you’ll now see a new item below it named User Administration that you’ll need to click on.  Once there, you will see a listing of who already has rights to view or access the information contained in Webmaster Tools for the particular site that you’re viewing.

As you can see, I’m currently looking at the http://www.jets-fan.com web site. You’ll notice that there are three different provision levels.  You’ve got the Owner level, that’s me right now, then there is Full level, and there’s also an item called Restricted.  It’s very easy to add somebody to your access levels here. In fact, you can at upwards of 100 users to the site to manage their permissions.

All you’ll need to do is hit the Add a New User button and up will pop a window where you can add an e-mail address… for now I’ll just add test@example.com.  We then select if we want Restricted or Full access.  I’ll grant this one Full access and then hit Add and that email with the selected permission level shows up.  We can also delete anybody from the listing by simply clicking on the particular user, hitting the delete button and OK’ing the Remove User message.

The three different permission levels give users various ranges of things that they can do. Here’s a quick list of those options. Primarily, when granting somebody Full Use, that permission level gives them the ability to view most of the data and take most actions like changing site settings, demoting site links and so on.  Whereas the Restricted View, as you see, is much more limited and can view things like links to your site, keywords, internal links, search impact and so on.

Now, if you are an owner of the site, you can go to the owner verification page and you can see how people who are owners were verified.  If you yourself are an owner, you can add other verified owners.

There is one caveat to keep in mind about the ownership panel.  Anybody that you add to the Webmaster Tools administrative area is sort of tied to you.  So, if for some reason, you were to lose your site verification rights, anybody that you’ve added to the verification would be removed as well.  Which, I think is a really good idea.  Let’s say you run an SEO company and you’ve added some of your employees to one of your clients Webmaster Tools site so they can do different tasks for you or to monitor and report on things. It would make sense that if the owner of this site were to remove you from their Webmaster Tools the people that you’ve added would also be removed.  Again, if you do get bounced from being a verified site user, anybody that you’ve added would also get bounced.

Easy User Administration is something we’ve been waiting for from Google for a while now.  I’m really glad it’s finally arrived.  To use it you simply:

1. Go into your Webmaster Tools control panel,
2. hit Site Configuration option,
3. Select User Administration,
4. Hit the Add a New User button,
5. Pick Restricted or Full access, and

We’re all really happy to see Google add this functionality to Webmaster Tools and we plan to have a few more new things for you in the coming weeks on our video blog.

Thanks again! If you’d like to learn more about SEO, consider attending one of our SEO training workshops near you.