Google recently held themed Webmaster Office Hours, one of them dealt solely with Google Search Console and John Mueller included a tip I hadn’t heard before helps keep your Search Console verification more secure.

Google recommends that when you verify a site in Google Search Console, that you verify with two different methods.  That way, if one is removed, such as we sometimes see when a site is hacked, then there is still a backup method that keeps a verification for your account intact.

Google also recommends that the two methods be unrelated to each other, again for security reasons.  The two examples they give are verification through both the verification file and through DNS.

Make sure you are using two or more unrelated verification methods so that if one of them fails, the other one will definitely still be there.

So common possibility would be to use DNS and file verification, so that if DNS fails, then obviously your website won’t be available.  But the file based verification, if your server kind of loses that files, if you drop out,  if the server is returning errors for some reason, then the other one will be able to back you up.

There are actually five ways to verify your Google Search Console account – HTML file upload, domain name provier, HTML tag, Google Analytics tracking code and Google Tag Manager.

So it might be a good idea to add a second verification method to your Google Search Console account, before you might have a situation where you wish you had it done.