Managing Many Sites in TurboIndex: Agencies and Portfolios

TurboIndex manages many sites from one dashboard: a site list you can search, filter by status, sort and arrange into groups such as client names, with one clear action per site depending on its state and the ability to pause or resume several sites at once. Each site has its own sitemaps, its own URL list, its own indexing keys and its own daily capacity. The free plan covers one site; Starter, Pro, Agency and Ultimate cover 3, 10, 20 and 50.

This article walks through the dashboard with a portfolio, then through the two things that matter most at that scale: daily capacity per site, and Owner access on properties you do not own yourself.

Adding several properties at once

After signing in with Google, the dashboard shows the properties your account can see in Search Console, with your permission level on each. Properties where you are an Owner have an Add site button; properties where you are a Full or Restricted user show "Owner needed", because the next step requires adding an owner and only owners can do that. Add the sites you want, one after another, and each one appears in the list with the status "Setup needed" until its indexing account has Owner access.

Two habits save time with many properties: when a site has both a Domain property and a URL-prefix property, add the Domain property, which covers every subdomain and protocol; and after a client adds you to a new property, click Refresh from Search Console at the top of the dashboard instead of signing out and in again.

For each site the sitemaps listed in Search Console are read and the URLs counted, so you see straight away how big each site is before any submission happens. When a client's sitemap looks wrong (a count of zero, or far more URLs than the site has pages), run it through the sitemap validator before going further.

The site list

With a handful of sites the list is just a list. With forty it needs structure, and the dashboard gives it four tools:

Search. Type part of a host name to narrow the list. Useful when a client calls about "the shop site" and you have three shops.

Status filters. Show only sites that need setup, only active sites, only paused sites, or only sites where access was lost. The first and the last are the ones to open every morning: they list the sites where nothing is being submitted, and why.

Sorting. Sort by name or by the figures on each row. Sorting by the indexed figure puts the sites with the biggest gap between pages found and pages indexed at the top, which is where the work is.

Groups. A group is a label you give a site, typically the client's name. The list can be shown grouped, so each client's sites sit together with their figures, and a group can be filtered on its own. Groups change nothing about quotas, keys or access. To take a site out of its group, open More on its row and choose Remove label; for several sites at once, select them and press Remove label in the bar under the list with the label field left empty.

One action per site state

Every row ends with a single button, and the button depends on the site's state, so you never have to work out what to do next:

State	What it means	The button
Setup needed	The indexing account is not yet an Owner of the property	Finish setup, which opens the wizard at the right step
Access lost	Google no longer accepts the account as an owner, or the key was rejected	Fix access, which runs the ownership check and shows what changed
Paused	Submissions are stopped on purpose	Resume
Active	Sitemaps are read, pages are checked and submitted	Open, which goes to the site's URL list

"Access lost" is the state to watch on client sites. The usual causes are a client removing the indexing account from Users and permissions (sometimes while cleaning up users), a property being removed from Search Console, or the Indexing API being disabled in the Google Cloud project of an own key. The site keeps its URL list and history; it just cannot submit until access is back.

Bulk pause and resume

Select several sites and pause or resume them together. Pausing stops submissions for those sites and nothing else: no URL is removed, no setting is changed, and nothing happens in Search Console. Resuming continues from where each site stopped.

When to use it: a client's contract ends and you want to keep the history until the paperwork is sorted; a migration, where old URLs should not be submitted while redirects are being set up; a maintenance window on your own servers.

Removing a site is a different thing: Remove site, at the end of the row's More menu, deletes everything TurboIndex holds for that site, and adding it again starts from zero. If you gave the One click permission, it also takes the indexing account off the property; if not, the dashboard names the address to remove under Users and permissions, so you can pass it on to the client.

What the figures mean

Each active site shows three figures on the list and a few more on its own page:

• Pages indexed of pages found. The number of URLs Google confirmed as indexed, out of all URLs from the site's sitemaps and manual additions. This is the figure to compare across sites.
• Waiting on Google. URLs that have been submitted and whose result is not in yet. Submitted pages are checked again after 2, 3, 5, 7 and 14 days.
• Sent today. Submissions made since midnight Pacific time, which is when Google resets the daily quota.

On the site page the same data becomes a bar of lifecycle statuses (Found, Queued, Submitted, Indexed, Not indexed, Blocked), two meters for Google submissions and index checks used today, and a 30-day trend of indexed pages. Google allows 2,000 index checks per property per day, so a large site takes several days for a complete first pass, and the "Index checks today" meter tells you whether that is the bottleneck.

A site with many pages in "Not indexed" for weeks is not a submission problem. Open the URL list and read the reason in the "Google says" column; "Crawled - currently not indexed" on one template is a content question for the client. A block of "Blocked" pages after a deploy usually means a noindex or a redirect nobody intended; the check that catches those before any submission is described in how TurboIndex checks pages before submitting.

Keys and daily capacity per site

This is the part worth understanding properly when you run many sites, because it decides how much each site can send per day.

A key is a Google service account in one Google Cloud project. Google gives each project 200 Indexing API submissions per day, shared by every property the account owns. TurboIndex offers two kinds of key:

• A TurboIndex key. Provided by the service, no Google Cloud work on your side. It is shared with other sites, so the 200 of that project are shared too.
• Your own key. A service account in your own project, added as Owner only on the properties you choose. Its 200 belong to those sites. You can upload a key you created yourself, or let the wizard create the project, the service account and the key in your Google account with Set it up for me. Either way the project is yours and you can delete it whenever you want. The steps, and the curl test that proves a key works, are in how to create a Google Indexing API key.

The site's settings page lists its keys with their status (Owner verified, needs Owner access, quota used today) and how much each one has used today. The site's daily capacity is the lowest of three numbers: what its keys can still send, the plan's limit per site, and what is left of the plan's daily total for all your sites. You can also set a lower limit per site by hand, so a small brochure site does not use up the day's submissions of the bigger ones.

For agencies the clean pattern is one project per client site with the client's own key: each site has its own 200, the client can see and revoke the key in their own Google Cloud, and nothing one client does affects another. What you should not do is create many projects for one site to push past 200 a day. Google's documentation names that as abuse, and the proper route is the quota increase form explained in Google Indexing API quota.

Plan limits

	Free	Starter	Pro	Agency	Ultimate
Price	$0	$5 a month	$9 a month	$29 a month	$59 a month
Sites	1	3	10	20	50
Pages watched per site	500	5,000	25,000	100,000	500,000
Google submissions a day, all sites	20	100	500	2,000	10,000
Unindexed pages sent again after	14 days	7 days	5 days	3 days	3 days
Indexed pages rechecked every	30 days	7 days	7 days	7 days	7 days

The free plan is the whole product rather than a demo: automatic sitemap sync, the pre-check, index tracking for every URL, IndexNow for Bing, Yandex and the others, and your own key. Starter, Pro, Agency and Ultimate add room for more sites and bigger sitemaps, more submissions a day, weekly rechecks of indexed pages and the Search tab; Pro, Agency and Ultimate come back to unindexed pages sooner and add webhooks. Ultimate's 10,000 a day is 50 sites at 200 each, so it assumes each site has its own key, as described above. A year of any paid plan costs ten months. No plan changes Google's quota: each Google Cloud project sends 200 a day, and the pricing page has the details.

Working with clients' Search Console properties

Google's rule is that the indexing account must be an Owner of the property, and only an existing owner can add one. For a client's site there are three ways to get there:

1. The client makes you an owner. Then you can run the one-click setup or add the account by hand. This gives you the most control and is the usual arrangement for an agency that manages the client's SEO.
2. The client adds the indexing account themselves. Send them the email address from the wizard and the five steps: Settings, Users and permissions, Add user, paste the email, choose Owner. Two minutes, and they keep full control. Then you click Verify access.
3. The client's own Google Cloud key. For clients with a security policy about third-party access, the client creates the project and key, adds its service account as Owner on their property, and gives you the JSON file to upload. The key can be revoked on their side at any time.

Whichever way, Owner access in Search Console is not access to the client's server, CMS or domain. The indexing account sends URL notifications and asks Search Console which properties it owns, nothing else, and a service account cannot sign in to Search Console in a browser.

What to do next

1. Add every property you own, finish setup on each, and give the ones that belong to the same client the same group.
2. For client sites, send the client the manual steps or ask for ownership, then verify access.
3. Decide per site whether a shared key is enough or whether the site should have its own project.
4. Make the "setup needed" and "access lost" filters your morning check.