Last week Google introduced a new method of verifying websites for Google Webmaster Tools.
As before, you can verify using a Meta Tag on the homepage of your website, which allows you to view all of the tools and information from Google.
Google have now made changes to the file upload verification method. Previously the file upload involved placed a named file (such as Google12345678a.html) in the root directory of your website. This file was simply a blank HTML file with a reference number as the name. This method worked fine for verifying websites if you had already set up the error handling page with a 404 header status. However, if you were working on a new site and hadn’t been able to do this yet the file upload process would not work and you would be unable to use the webmaster tools Google offer for your website.
With the new upload process the file name remains the same but as well as the file name there is now content on the page such as “google-site-verification: google123456789a.html”. This resolves the issue of your site needing to have the 404 header status on the error page as Google is reading the contents of the file, similar to how Bing verifies websites.
This enables you to take advantage of all the tools in Google’s Webmaster Tools whilst your site is in development, such as Sitemap.xml submission, broken links found by Google’s crawlers and the Robots.txt checking tool.
However, don’t forget the importance of the 404 header status on your error page as this is an important part of the SEO of your website as serving 404 messages on broken links will not only help you maintain your site’s integrity but will also stop broken links from appearing in the SERPs.
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