A couple days ago, I reported that SEOs were reporting seeing old messages in newly verified Google Search Console accounts.

I honestly thought this was the case for a while, so I asked John Mueller about it in the Google+ hangout last night and he said, it isn’t new. Google has shown some old messages to newly verified users in the Google Search Console for some time.

They don’t show all OLD messages, just the ones they think make the most sense.

John said “for some messages we set it up so new owners also see them for a specific time period, and other types of messages are just for the current owner.”

I asked John to clarify and categorize in a general way which messages would show to new verified users and he said he couldn’t. I am not sure he knew off the top of his head, so he didn’t want to answer. John said at the 7:20 mark into the video:

I am planning on asking this question to Juan Felipe Rincón of the Google Search Quality team who work on Manual Actions in our keynote session Sunday morning at SMX Israel – hopefully I will get a solid answer on that, because it is important.

Here is the video embed at the start time:

Forum discussion at Google+.