By As we had already mentioned in a previous article, the “set of properties” functionality that was present in the old Search Console was part of the reports and features that will not be included in the new one.
I had the opportunity to point out that this decision lost a useful functionality, because being able to track the KPIs of multiple Search Consoles accounts in a single report has many practical applications.
Google, however, had hinted that they were considering replacing this feature with a new “cross-domain” report.
It didn’t take long for the deployment of this new feature, which was announced on February 27 in a post on Google’s webmasters blog.
But is it really the equivalent? Not at all !
A report available only if you have used DNS verification
The new functionality allows you to create a “cross-domain” account which allows you to have reports for all protocols, and all subdomains. If your domain is mydomain.com, then the reports will aggregate data from the http: and protocols, with or without www, from all subdomains, including the mobile site in m.
Obviously, if you have defined Search Console accounts for subdirectories, the data concerning these will also be aggregated.
It is simple and efficient. On the other hand, we have seriously lost in granularity!
A report only available if you have used DNS verification
There is another downside to this feature: creating this cross-domain account only works if you have verified your account using the DNS method.
I know from experience that a lot of site owners don’t have easy access to their DNS zone files, so I’m afraid this feature will be even less popular than the old one (removed precisely because it wasn’t used enough).
If on the other hand you can add a TXT field in your DNS zone file, then it is easy to create such an aggregated account.
