Google Webmaster Tools – Verification
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Hello, I’ve just spent the past two hours trying to work out how to verify my web site with Google+. After having finally found the correct place to enter the verification code, I’m not sure if I should put in the leading “google” part or just the number, and whether I should put the trailing “.html” or not. I have tried all 3 ways of entering the code and none of them appear to work. Also, your explanation page makes no mention of this, and the sample number is much longer and formatted differently. Having said that, Google’s help doesn’t provide any clear answer either… Help!
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi Edward,
To verify your site, you’ll need to follow the steps in our guide for setting up Google Webmaster Tools. Specifically, you’ll need to use the “HTML Tag” option, which will look similar to this tag:
<meta name='google-site-verification' content='dBw5CvburAxi537Rp9qi5uG2174Vb6JwHwIRwPSLIK8'>(You may need to select Alternate Methods to find that HTML tag.)
Then, you can copy the long string of letters and numbers in between the quotation marks and paste that in the Tools page in your site’s dashboard.
Please let me know if you have any other questions about that!
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Thanks very much! I clicked Alternate Methods and pasted that exact string into Tools, and it now works.
I would like to point out that the instructions could be a lot clearer for people not having much knowledge of web building or HTML, but at least you have one more satisfied customer now. :)
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You’re welcome! Is there a particular step in that guide that tripped you up the first time around? That’ll help me clarify the instructions for the next person. :)
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What I didn’t understand was that I needed to copy the entire meta tag, because the instructions appeared to be saying to only copy the part in bold:
5. You’ll see a line of HTML code like this:
<meta name=”google-site-verification” content=”rc2RXSkjV5rz9P2s2hTwdDsnwTu4tD-gmruKUrqBGjs” />
You will only need a section of the HTML code, the part which we have shown above in bold. Copy it. -
Also, in the sample image of the WordPress instructions, only the numeric part was copied which is what I was doing, whereas in fact to get it to work I had to paste the entire meta tag provided by Google’s Alternate Method code, as such:
<meta name=”google-site-verification” content=”rc2RXSkjV5rz9P2s2hTwdDsnwTu4tD-gmruKUrqBGjs” />
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Thanks for letting me know about that! I’ll double-check all of those instructions in our guide and make sure it’s up to date.
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