Jalaj

May 21, 2007

Get your WordPress.com Blog Google Verified

Filed under: Blogs, Buzz, Google, Internet, Security, Wordpress — Jalaj @ 11:59 pm

Google Webmaster Tools extends a range of tools / reports allowing you to know how your site/blog is placed in Google searches, which are the most popular keywords that result in your site being showed in searches, and which made researcher to click and follow to your site, internal and external links to your site/blog

webmaster.jpg

This and much more you can get only when your site is verified by Google. Google allows you to choose one of the two methods:
- Either you add a meta tag to your home page as given by Google
- Or you add a web page with a name as suggested by Google.

If you are successful in doing one of the above, you are the winner. Unfortunately as a WordPress.com blog owner, me and the others don’t have facility to perform any one of the above.

So should we just stop our efforts? No! well said, Where there’s a Will… there’s a Way…

And yes! There is certainly a way following which I have successfully verified my blog with Google. If you too own a blog at WordPress.com you will be able to do it too!!!

Assumed that you own a Google account, Log on to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview

Submit your blog url at “Add Site:”. Your site would be added instantly but in absence of verification you will not have access to most of the features. Click on the link that says “Verify your site”

As mentioned above you will be required to choose one of the verification methods. Choose “Upload an HTML file” and you will be told to upload a file with name similar to “google51603ad9d1bcb791.html”.

Question is how do we upload the file?

Leave the Window opened and open the WordPress.com Dashboard. Navigate through the links to create a new page (please note PAGE not post). Give the page title as the name of the HTML that Google gave and press on “Publish” and your page gets published.

Unfortunately though, the page that appears is “google51603ad9d1bcb791html” i.e. stripping off the DOT before html. :-(

But… :-) fortunately the same thing also happens when you try to access “google51603ad9d1bcb791.html” at your blog. WordPress.com strips off the DOT (mod-rewrite) and shows up you the page “google51603ad9d1bcb791html”. No “File Not Found Error” is returned unlike what you would have expected.

Now… you just need… to open the Google verification page again and fire the “Verify” button and you have done it…

Update (04.06.2007):
Google insists and requires you to maintain the verification page which it can occasionally check and in absense of which the blog will again appear as Unverified. The re-verification mostly seem to be happening when you make changes in settings as “Crawl Rate” etc or add or delete a sitemap.

If you are using a theme that doesnot show up the pages by default, then it’s better that instead of using “Pages” widget you use a “Text” widget to manually show your pages. Otherwise you can, instead of deleting the page mark it with status “Draft” and publish it whenever you need to re-verify and then again mark it as Draft.

The Google Webmaster Tools is worth it. For details read Google Webmaster Tools - A Tutorial

Happy Googling……..

Hi //Engtech and Lorelle . Please help spreading the word. Thanks

69 Comments »

  1. Works great. I tried the same trick around a year ago using a page. But back then wordpress.com would only give a 404. I wonder if someone changed something to specifically let us do this?

    Good find.

    Comment by engtech — May 21, 2007 @ 8:51 pm

  2. May be… but why didn’t they document this… I have seen a few relevent posts by you and Lorelle and there were many others who were looking for the solution in forums…

    May be they did this for the same reason but did not publicize as that may also result in increased googlebot traffic

    Comment by Jalaj — May 22, 2007 @ 4:14 am

  3. [...] Get Your WordPress.com Blog Now Verified by Google’s Webmaster Tools Since Google came out with the Google Sitemap, WordPress.com bloggers have had no luck verifying their WordPress.com blogs until now. Jalaj has come up with “Get your WordPress.com Blog Google Verified”. [...]

    Pingback by Get Your WordPress.com Blog Now Verified by Google's Webmaster Tools « Lorelle on WordPress — May 23, 2007 @ 1:18 pm

  4. your answer My Friend on the question why its not giving a 404 Error is on this page.

    http://faq.wordpress.com/2007/05/23/gmail-mx/

    When it’s time to verify domain ownership, choose the “Upload an HTML file” option. We have simplified the process however, so there is no need to upload anything! Once you have chosen this option, you will see a verification code that starts with “google” and ends with a series of random characters. You will need to use this code in the next step, so copy it to the clipboard.

    Comment by clazh — May 23, 2007 @ 2:35 pm

  5. that’s a gorgeous hack, thanks for figuring this out!

    Comment by adam — May 23, 2007 @ 3:04 pm

  6. Thank you, thank you. Awesome. I’m verified.

    Comment by Andy Piper — May 23, 2007 @ 3:36 pm

  7. I think this may have been fixed when they added the support for Google Mail for Your Domain today.

    Comment by engtech — May 23, 2007 @ 4:45 pm

  8. Can you safely delete the page once you have verified?

    Comment by cathcam — May 23, 2007 @ 4:47 pm

  9. Thanks a million for this! Great tip.

    Comment by Hameed Khan — May 23, 2007 @ 5:10 pm

  10. I wonder if the ability to do this is related to WordPress’ new donamin name email verification through Google. I’m pretty sure it verifies the same way 9upload an html file). maybe WordPress changed something forcing all .html requests to forward to the same URL minus the “dot”. Might be able to test it by making a page called texthtml and visiting test.html.

    Comment by Josh Miller — May 23, 2007 @ 6:09 pm

  11. [...] Also it seems a side effect of this upgrade is that you can now create a page file that will verify through Google Webmaster Tools. [...]

    Pingback by Email Sweetness « Lameazoid.com — May 23, 2007 @ 6:54 pm

  12. Thank you, as well. I tried other combos, to no avail.

    It doesn’t work for uniblogs.org, however, even though the page exists. (the dot between the number and html is removed and the page slug creates just numberhtml) Doesn’t recognize a post, either

    Verification status: NOT VERIFIED
    Last attempt May 23, 2007: We’ve detected that your verification file returns a status of 404 (Not found) in the header.

    Comment by mpb — May 23, 2007 @ 9:53 pm

  13. It’s not working for me; I am able to access the page from my blog exactly as described above but Google cannot verify. When I use Google’s link I get a 404.

    Comment by joy — May 23, 2007 @ 11:01 pm

  14. Can we delete that page , once blog is verified ?

    Comment by bachodi — May 24, 2007 @ 1:53 am

  15. @mpb: It may be in a future version of wordpress MU, or it might be something they’re doing with the internals of wordpress.com

    Comment by engtech — May 24, 2007 @ 2:33 am

  16. @mpb and Joy
    The method still works for subdomains on wordpress.com (It’s all that I have). For custom domains maybe engtech could help he recently got internetducttape.com mapped to the blog.

    @cathcam and bachodi
    Yes you can delete the page as soon as blog gets verified.

    Comment by Jalaj — May 24, 2007 @ 4:47 am

  17. @clazh - This upgrade may have something to do with this as verification was not available earlier.

    WordPress’ post on mapping domains to gmail mentions pasting the filename to appropriate location after which it avoids sending 404 error for that page.

    Whatever be the reason, it’s good that we have it. Hope WordPress continues with it to cater to all future blogs.

    Comment by Jalaj — May 24, 2007 @ 5:00 am

  18. [...] the factor that influenced this move was the recent modifications on wordpress.com that facilitated verification on Google Webmasters tools. Since this popped up as an undocumented feature, it is not guaranteed to work in future. And if [...]

    Pingback by Wordpress.com Domain Upgrade « Jalaj — May 24, 2007 @ 12:46 pm

  19. @mpb and Joy - Update…
    Verification is still working even for custom domains… As you can see this blog has shifted to domain jalaj.net from jalaj.wordpress.com and yes I successfully got it verified.

    Comment by Jalaj — May 24, 2007 @ 1:19 pm

  20. The uniblogs.org and edublogs.org are not ported domains of WP.com, so that may be why it is still a problem for those.

    Often what works at wp.com works for the other wpMU, but not always.

    Thank you.

    Comment by mpb — May 25, 2007 @ 1:18 am

  21. Nice tip. Thanks.
    I was able to verify! I made the page private. I think I’ll leave that way a while before I delete it.

    Comment by GoingLikeSixty — May 25, 2007 @ 2:20 am

  22. Thanks again, very useful tip. For what its worth I didn’t try to include the .html when I created the page and it seemed to work fine.

    I will delete the page now, thank you.

    Comment by Mark Cathcart — May 25, 2007 @ 12:36 pm

  23. [...] OT: Verifying WordPress blogs for Google Webmaster Published May 25th, 2007 Uncategorized Credit jalaj who posted this workaround to get wordpress based blogs verified for Google Webmaster tools. His blog entry is here. [...]

    Pingback by OT: Verifying Wordpress blogs for Google Webmaster « Adventures in systems land — May 25, 2007 @ 1:50 pm

  24. Great tip, just had something to add…

    I tested the steps writen above but it didnt work for me, but i tested the meta tag option and added the meta tag in the “header.php” file in the theme editor.

    on the 5th row is a meta tag for WordPress:
    ” />

    i presed enter after it and added my meta tag under it and tryed it, and it worked!

    might want to try it…

    Comment by Kim Böndergaard — May 25, 2007 @ 11:19 pm

  25. [...] Jag såg på en blogg att det var problem med att verifiera sin blogg om man använder WordPress som bloggverktyg men att dom hadde ett sätt att komma förbi det (http://jalaj.net/2007/05/21/get-your-wordpresscom-blog-google-verified/). [...]

    Pingback by Threezool » Verifiera sin Wordpress blogg på Google — May 25, 2007 @ 11:32 pm

  26. @ Kim
    It’s for wordpress (dot) com blogs not wordpress.org blogs. At wordpress.com you can not change your header.php. That’s why it didn’t work for you as described.

    Worked for me,Jalaj. Much thanks!

    Comment by Jolie — May 26, 2007 @ 2:21 pm

  27. [...] Click here to go to the article. TechnologyWhats New? Posted by SuperRaJJ under Technology, What’s New? | You can bookmark this on Del.icio.us, Y! MyWeb 2.0, Netvouz, Furl, Simpy or Spurl. [...]

    Pingback by All Pumped Up! » Get your Wordpress.com blog verified by Google Webmaster Tools and Sitemaps — May 27, 2007 @ 11:38 am

  28. Oh, didnt notice the .org/.com but it seems to work for others so great finding =)

    Comment by Kim Böndergaard — May 29, 2007 @ 9:40 am

  29. [...] Also, you might want to get your blog Google verified (link to tutorial for Blogger) so your blog gets crawled so your chances to show up on search results increases. Here is a tutorial for you WordPress.com users. [...]

    Pingback by How to track your Blogger statistics with Google | Infektia.net — May 29, 2007 @ 11:18 pm

  30. Thanks, Jalaj. Worked flawlessly on 2 accounts. The other one was temporarily problematic (the WordPress servers went down for a couple minutes at the same time… hope it wasn’t me LOL) but then it worked also. Now that I’ve got them verified, all I have to do is learn how to use the Google Webmaster Tools.

    Comment by Greg Fowler — May 30, 2007 @ 9:58 pm

  31. ca marche imicable,j’ai juste un subdomaine

    j’ai telecharger le fichier html avec une modification d’ectention en format .txt

    reste uniquement d’attendre 48 heurs pour la verification

    Comment by dr55 — June 2, 2007 @ 12:39 am

  32. This worked a charm but I noticed a few days later (well it was 4 days) Google webmaster said my site wasn’t verified again.
    I had deleted the googleverify page off my blog, now it seems you need to keep it there but i am guessing security wise it would be an unwise thing (plus who want a google123456789html page on their blog)?

    Any other suggestion? (a private page does not work)

    Comment by goldcoaster — June 2, 2007 @ 1:03 pm

  33. Yeah, this is broken now. Gutted.

    Comment by Andy Piper — June 3, 2007 @ 9:44 pm

  34. @goldcoaster Unfortunately yes you need to maintain the page. Please read update on the post in Red

    Comment by Jalaj — June 4, 2007 @ 4:17 am

  35. Thank you. I wonder if there’s a “hack” for google analytics.

    Comment by hanz — June 10, 2007 @ 4:44 am

  36. [...] Google Verification to use Analytics for your WordPress.com Blog After my post on wordpress.com blog passing Google verification for Webmaster Tools, I heard a few voices “Is something like that possible for using Google [...]

    Pingback by Pass Google Verification to use Analytics for your Wordpress.com Blog « Jalaj — June 11, 2007 @ 12:54 pm

  37. Thanks a lot! very good post.

    Comment by all4test — June 21, 2007 @ 9:54 am

  38. [...] a great tip from Jalaj.net on getting your wordpress.com blog verified. The good news is that it’s even easier if you have a blog hosted on your own servers. You [...]

    Pingback by Wordpress Bloggers: Improve SEO Get Your Adult Blog Google Verified | adult BLOG advice, webmaster tools & techniques — June 28, 2007 @ 9:02 pm

  39. Nice article, well written, I really like the way this site looks, I wish other autohors took the time you are to help fix there site and make it look good. Keep up the great writing!

    Comment by Vasity — July 3, 2007 @ 7:11 pm

  40. [...] Also, you might want to get your blog Google verified (link to tutorial for Blogger) so your blog gets crawled so your chances to show up on search results increases. Here is a tutorial for you WordPress.com users. [...]

    Pingback by Blogger seo « The eagle on the stone — July 6, 2007 @ 2:07 pm

  41. Thanks for the great tip! I’m keeping my static page saved as a draft, just in case.

    Comment by Terry Heath — July 10, 2007 @ 3:41 pm

  42. [...] Get your WordPress.com Blog Google Verified [...]

    Pingback by Google Toolbar PR Update « Jalaj — July 17, 2007 @ 6:39 am

  43. [...] to a ListBoxEmail forwarding – All Fun and No Responsibility ?Adding File Names to a ListBox - 3Get your WordPress.com Blog Google VerifiedGoogle Toolbar PR UpdateLow Level Handling of DBF FilesJust Looking BackWorking with menus in Visual [...]

    Pingback by Jalaj — July 18, 2007 @ 7:48 am

  44. [...] template se non si utenti Csspro. Ad ogni modo girovagando un po’ forse ho trovato una possibile soluzione. __________________ elle :: community solutions elle [...]

    Pingback by » Visualizzare il blogrool — July 18, 2007 @ 11:20 am

  45. [...] realtà, come si spiega in questo articolo, la cosa è abbastanza semplice: si crea una nuova pagina con Wp (non post: pagina), e si [...]

    Pingback by Verificare il blog wordpress.com con Google (SEO dei poveri) « Metablog — July 26, 2007 @ 2:18 pm

  46. [...] site with Google October 5, 2007 Posted by pacio49 in ICM501. trackback There’s a good post on how to work around the ‘verify’ conundrum that happens with Google’s Webmaster Tools and the lack of control over uploading html or [...]

    Pingback by Verifying your Wordpress site with Google « Graduate Interactive Communications — October 5, 2007 @ 3:46 pm

  47. The google webmaster tools verify solution works really brilliantly

    Thanks

    Comment by hopcott — October 24, 2007 @ 10:08 am

  48. [...] http://jalaj.net/2007/05/21/get-your-wordpresscom-blog-google-verified/ [...]

    Pingback by Indexing your blog with google « Paulsdigitalworld’s Weblog — November 6, 2007 @ 9:03 am

  49. i just verified my page and set my google page on WP to “private” so that I think it’ll be active yet no one externally will be able to see it….does this sound like it will work when google re-verifies the site later??

    Comment by helenshodgepodge — November 12, 2007 @ 8:47 pm

  50. I’m confused. I get verified, but don’t I need to add a sitemap? Googlebbot accesses my page, but nothing is indexed, and i can only imagine its because i’ve not added a sitemap as is required.

    Comment by Cory Greenwell — November 14, 2007 @ 4:32 pm

  51. You don’t need to post sitemap to be included in Google index…

    In fact you are included there in the index… It seems that you recently had a domain upgrade at wordpress.com… accessing your .com redirects to wordpress.com subdomain. To include .com pages on Google index you should go to wordpress.com dashboard, then OPTIONS, then DOMAINS, now click on “Put your blog here” link to make your new .com as primary address. That way your wordpress.com subdomain pages would redirect to new .com pages which in turn will be indexed and later replace old pages…

    Comment by Jalaj — November 15, 2007 @ 4:07 am

  52. [...] One Digest The two pillar post in the first year were Get your WordPress.com Blog Google Verified and Get into Technorati Top 100 in 24 Hours that brought most views in a single [...]

    Pingback by Year One Digest « Jalaj — December 12, 2007 @ 2:38 pm

  53. Awesome hack. THanks

    Comment by Charlie — January 17, 2008 @ 6:40 am

  54. Hi,
    I tried the above method but it did not work and I tried all possible ways (posting only the code minus the .html etc). Can you tell me what I am doing wrong.
    I have a weird feeling it is because of my PERMALINK structure. What permalink structure do you recommend?

    Comment by Karthik — January 27, 2008 @ 3:15 am

  55. @Karthik -
    You seem to be using a self-hosted wordpress blog. This post is about wordpress.com hosted blog where blogger is not allowed to upload html page or change meta tags, one of which is required to pass Google verification.

    You can upload an html to your self hosted blog or if it does not work (happens when your server does not return 404 error in header) change the theme header to include suggested meta tags, which you can do from wordpress dashboard itself.

    Comment by Jalaj — January 27, 2008 @ 9:03 pm

  56. Thank you! This worked like a charm. Now on to the tutorial!

    Comment by ekettle — February 2, 2008 @ 3:58 pm

  57. Hey, if you are into contests there is a great contest on YouTube for Valentines Day. The contest is to create a video for the holiday. Actually its two contests, one is to make a video talking about your great love and the second is to actually do an online video proposal called “Will You Marry Me?” Here’s the URL http://www.youtube.com/greatestlovestories?cm_cid=twb8. If you have a last minute entry great, otherwise check out the contest winners next week.

    Comment by JContest — February 8, 2008 @ 10:48 pm

  58. Nice and well presented contest, but alas I have never created professional (at least competitive) videos

    Comment by Jalaj — February 9, 2008 @ 1:32 am

  59. [...] March 2, 2008 by cartransportquote Google Varification Page [...]

    Pingback by googlef4646284ee2e2efd.html « Car Transport Quote — March 2, 2008 @ 3:32 pm

  60. Thank you so much for this!
    Now we can say: “when there is a will… there is a way” :)

    Comment by Master Global E-Business Lille — March 17, 2008 @ 10:57 am

  61. Thanks, but I don’t think this is working anymore.
    I can access the site from google link but it still says not verified.

    Any Ideas?

    Thanks!

    kanebt

    kanebt.wordpress.com

    Comment by KaneBT — March 25, 2008 @ 8:15 am

  62. its not working not

    Comment by cricketgod — March 29, 2008 @ 4:23 pm

  63. wowzer!!! thanks a lot

    Comment by bubbleonfire — March 31, 2008 @ 2:43 pm

  64. Awesome! Thanks so much!

    Comment by kellyinkc — April 2, 2008 @ 3:48 am

  65. Hi,

    I’m on wordpress.com with a private domain name, I’m verified through the google apps ( through the gmail support by wordpress.com)
    but the webmaster tool want’s me to verify his way, I tried adding a new page with the verification page name at the title but I’m getting an error:

    “We’ve detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a status of 200 (Found successfully) in the header.
    We’ve detected that your server returns a status of 200 (Successfully) for pages that don’t exist. We can’t verify sites with this configuration because it would enable anyone to verify ownership of your site. You can try our meta tag verification method or change your server’s configuration…. If your web server is configured to return a status of 200 (found) in the header of 404 (not found) pages, and we enabled you to verify your site with this configuration”

    Arn’t we all on the same server ?
    What can I do ?

    Thanks,
    Guy
    http://www.site5000.com

    Comment by Guy — April 3, 2008 @ 12:38 pm

  66. @Guy - You might be creating a POST instead of a PAGE… check again… The method is still working fine (just because wordpress.com people supported doing it, yahoo verification by same method doesn’t work)

    Others please not this method is for WORDPRESS.COM blogs and those using self hosted wordpress.org blogs can add meta tags from within the dashboard, or physically upload the verification file.

    Comment by Jalaj — April 4, 2008 @ 1:21 am

  67. Jalaj, thanks for your reply, I’m creating a page, that’s not the problem.

    If I enter a non exsiting address on my blog e.g. http://www.site5000.com/xxxxx.html I’ll get one of the exsiting pages. when I try it on other blogs I get some kind of NOT FOUND message
    so the webmaster tool Verify gives a correct message,

    I’m also on wordpress.com so I don’t know why this is happning
    ???

    Guy

    Comment by Guy — April 4, 2008 @ 10:34 am

  68. Hi… this worked.. brilliant stuff guys..

    Any ideas how to add urchin/analytics to wordpress…

    Supposedly wordpress also uses urchin..and redundancy is against google analytics policy… Any hacks?….

    Comment by Logik — April 21, 2008 @ 6:20 pm

  69. Hi
    I have different category blogs in wordpress, if i keep adding one by one to mybloglob,
    i need to verify my site with my bloglog , i get meta tag code for every submission
    where should i post that code

    Please help me on this

    Thanks

    Comment by kelly — May 8, 2008 @ 7:22 am

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