Google to kill off property sets within Search Console

This morning Google emailed verified Google Search Console owners that property sets is officially going away at the end of March. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, we reported that this will be going away just a couple months ago – but now, Google has sent notifications about the closure to those using the feature.

Why it matters. If you have used this feature to build out reports for your business or your clients, then that is going to change. Google will no longer support Property sets in the upcoming month. So you need to communicate the change to your managers and clients soon.

What are these? Property sets was a method to allow one to combine multiple verified profiles into a single set. So if you have an http, https, mobile site, an app, etc all verified for the same brand in Google Search Console – Google would enable you to group them all together in a new property to see how well the property as a whole was doing in the aggregate.

You can learn more on how it works over here.

The notification. Google sent a notification this morning that it is going away. “Property sets no longer supported in Search Console after March, 2019.” Here is a screenshot of the notification:

What can I do? Google says you can download the data from the interface or the API before they turn it off completely. After that, Google is not being specific. “We are working on providing other ways to manage sites with multiple hosts or protocols,” the company said.

We know Google tested a similar feature named domain property that automatically created these types of sets in the new version of Google Search Console. But that feature never launched, at least not yet.

Google also fully launched a more consolidated view of your performance report data in the new Google Search Console, which does some of this work automatically for you. But many SEOs probably like to control this and see the details of their various properties.

It is unclear what is coming to replace property sets.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.