Google now allows webmasters to group their Search Console properties into sets in their Search Console interface. Similarly to how Bing has always automatically grouped your Bing Webmaster Tools properties existing under a single domain into one property, Google has now added the capability to group this information without use of the API or a third party software to aggregate your data.
This is helpful in cases where you can’t or have trouble forcing a single variation of your website to your users. Without the proper redirects in place, you can easily find that your site starts to rank pages in four different variations of your site. In this case, you can see traffic coming in from a non-secure / www property (http://www.example-site.com), a secure / www property (https://www.example-site.com), a non-secure / non-www property (http://example-site.com), and a secure / non-www property (https://example-site.com).
Make sure you have all four of these combinations setup in Google Search Console to make sure you are capturing all of your organic click data. Also, keep in mind that you are only able to associate a single Search Console property with your Google Analytics property, so make sure you use the one that is bringing in the most traffic, especially if you or a client use the Google Analytics reporting features for gathering click data. We suggest you always get this data directly from the source though in Google Search Console for the most accurate representation of your data.
You should always strive to have all your traffic indexed and coming in from the same combination, but in cases where it is out of your hands this new feature is definitely a time saver. Gone are the days of exporting four separate data sets and pivoting the four sets of data together into a single usable report.
While the Search Analytics reporting data is available in these new property sets, not all features of Google Search Console are available. You will still need to review errors and submit sitemap information individually to each property. Major errors will be reported in the Messages area Search Console, but all other features will still need to be adjusted on the individual property level.
Refer to Google’s Support documentation about grouping properties in Search Console if you have questions about setting this functionality up.
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