Gary Illyes of Google said in the Google SEO office-hours from yesterday that verifying your website in Google Search Console won’t impact your Google Search indexing or ranking whatsoever.

Gary said, “Having your site verified in Search Console or changing the verification code and method has no effect on indexing or ranking whatsoever.”

John Mueller of Google previously said that Search Console verification doesn’t help with crawling either.

Gary added later that Search Console gives you data and analytics that can help you make improvements to your site to help you rank better in Google Search potentially. “You can use the data that Search Console gives you to improve your site and thus potentially do better in Search with your site, but otherwise has no effect on search whatsoever,” he added.

Here is the video embed at the 15:27 mark:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Gary Illyes from Google posted a new PSA on LinkedIn saying that the most common reason a site unexpectedly blocks Googlebot from crawling is due to a misconfiguration of a firewall or CDN.

Gary wrote, “check what traffic your firewalls and CDN are blocking.” “By far the most common issue in my inbox is related to firewalls or CDNs blocking googlebot traffic. If I reach out to the blocking site, in the vast majority of the cases the blockage is unintended.”

So what can you do? Gary said, “I’ve said this before, but want to emphasize it again: make a habit of checking your block rules. We publish our IP ranges so it should be very easy to run an automation that checks the block rules against the googlebot subnets.”

Gary linked to this help document for more details.

In short, do what you can to test to see if your site is accessible to Googlebot. You can use the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console, as one method. Also, confirm with your CDN or firewall company that they are allowing Googlebot and ask them to prove it.

Forum discussion at on LinkedIn.

Google is testing more card and box-like elements in the search results. We covered this with the product results interface a few weeks back but now we are seeing them for other elements.

Here are screenshots shared with me of these designs:

Via @b4k_khushal:

Via @mblumenthal via @b4k_khushal:

I kind of like them but I might be wrong. 🙂

Forum discussion at Twitter.