Google Webmaster Tool Verification Update
If you use Google Webmaster Tools to find out information and statistics about your websites, you’ll know that to access that information you must Verify that you are the owner of the site. You can do this in one of two ways:
- By adding a META tag to your home page. This will include a code that uniquely identifies your Google account. If you are able to edit the home page, then you must be the owner (or authorised user)
- By uploading an HTML file to your site’s root directory. The name of this file is your unique code, with an HTML extension. For example, it might be googlec9e7c4d1799410bc.html. Again, if you have the privilege to upload his file, then you must be the owner or authorised user.
There are advantages and disadvantages to using the two different methods.
META Tag
Using the META Tag means that you do not have any extra HTML files lying around in your root directory. It’s really not important except for the sake of tidiness.
The disadvantage is if you decide to completely renew your web home page. If you forget to include the META tag in the new page, then you will have to re-validate the site when you log in to Webmaster Tools.
Similarly, if you use something like WordPress, you might be unsure about editing the WordPress theme files to iniclude the META Tag. And if you switch to a different theme, you’ll have to go through the process all over again.
HTML File
This is my preferred method, because you only have to do it once. As long as you don’t delete the file, then you can change as much of your website as you want without having to re-verify it.
The disadvantage is that you might accidentally delete the file, especially if you do a site-wide rewrite.
Having said that you only have to do it once, though, I recently found that I had to re-verify all my sites because Google changed the mechanism slightly.
Originally, all you had to do was to create a file with the name Google specify, and upload it to your site’s root directory on your host server.
I always used an empty file with the correct name and it worked just fine.
Now, the file must have some content as specified by Google. In fact, they now supply a file for you to download and then upload to your server. The file now contains a line of text that looks like:
google-site-verification: googlec9e7c4d1799410bc.html
So unless you verified your sites recently or use the META Tag method, you’ll probably find that you’ll need to re-verify your sites next time you log in.
Fortunately, the code that they give you applies to your user account – not to the site. This means the same file can be uploaded to all of your websites for verification purposes.
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