Google announced the launch of a new Webmaster Tools feature, which lets verified site owners grant limited access to their site’s data and settings to other people.

You can do this from the home page, by clicking “Manage Site” and going to the “Add or remove users” option, which has replaced the “Add or remove owners” option. This will take you to a new User admin page. From here, you can add or delete up to 100 users. Users can be identified as “full” or “restricted” depending on the rights you want to assign them.

Full means they can view all data and take most actions. Restricted means they only have access to view most data, but can only take some actions, such as using Fetch as Googlebot and configuring message forwarding.

Here’s who can do what:

“You’ve had the ability to grant full verified access to others for a couple of years,” says Google Webmaster Trends analyst Jonathan Simon on the Webmaster Central blog. “Since then we’ve heard lots of requests from site owners for the ability to grant limited permission for others to view a site’s data in Webmaster Tools without being able to modify all the settings. Now you can do exactly that with our new User administration feature.”

“Users added via the User administration page are tied to a specific site,” he explains. “If you become unverified for that site any users that you’ve added will lose their access to that site in Webmaster Tools. Adding or removing verified site owners is still done on the owner verification page which is linked from the User administration page.”

Hopefully the new feature will make site management easier for webmasters with a lot of employees and colleagues, and save a lot of hassle when changes are needed, or need to be retracted.