Jul 08 2008
Verifying Wordpress.org blogs for Google Webmaster
If you have a Wordpress blog you may wish to have it verified with Google Webmaster. In order to verify your blog with Google Webmaster, Google offers two methods: verification by uploading a specifically named HTML file or by adding a meta tag into the HEAD section of your home page.
Having had some issues with the HTML file upload method (namely that it appears the Verified status drops off if Google can no longer crawl to the HTML file, if, for example, you created a page with the HTML file name and then marked that page as private, having previously had it verified successfully) I decided to try and find how to use the meta tag method on my hosted Wordpress blog. *Note that you won’t be able to use this method if you are on the out-of-the box Wordpress.com blog, as far as I am aware.
A Google search led me to this post by Jalaj on Jalaj.net which got my hopes up. It was in trawling through the comments on the post that I found what I was looking for in this helpful comment from Kim Böndergaard (comment number 24.).
In the Wordpress console go to Design->Theme Editor and edit the header.php Theme File. Then add in the meta tag information which Google Webmaster Tools gives you when you choose the meta tag verification method by pasting the meta tag in the HEAD section, which will look something similar to this sample from one of Google’s troubleshooting pages on this:
<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Your Title</TITLE> <META name="verify-v1" content="String_we_ask_for"> </HEAD> <BODY>
Update the File to save the changes and check back with the Google Webmaster page to be sure that your site is now marked as ‘Verified’.
This method seems to have worked for me - I felt compelled to put up a brief post about this after having a little difficulty finding a solution which worked.