re: the way GSV API works

[Guy]

I've been reading Google docs about GSV, however, I didn't find the
most simple and most important thing I was looking for. What if you'd
assign one UID per Google Account, which the developer could place the
same way he is normally using Google site meta verification. <meta
name="google-site-verification" content="#UID#" />

Why? Because I am personally responsible for managing +30 websites.
Verifying every website by generating <meta /> key for every website
is a pain. Why not use the same key when user needs to validate
multiple websites/domains?

[Kevin Marshall]

Hello Guy,

Good question.

Producing a unique meta tag for every website & user helps keep the
identities of the website owners private. If we were to issue the same
token for every site belonging to a given user, it becomes possible to
enumerate all the sites owned by that same user. One could
theoretically crawl the web, grab all the google-site-verification
meta tags, and compute the cluster of sites that are owned by the same
person. This could be invasive to that person's privacy.

You can use the same file verification token across your sites. File-
based verification tokens are not nearly as visible to the public, so
we do not vary them per-site like we do with meta tags.

Hope that helps,
Kevin