Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: verification

Tuesday, December 09, 2014

2. Understand how your app is doing in search results

How are users engaging with your app from search results? We’ve introduced two new ways for you to track performance for your app deep links:

We now send a weekly clicks and impressions update to the Message center in your Webmaster Tools account.
You can now track how much traffic app deep links drive to your app using referrer information - specifically, the referrer extra in the ACTION_VIEW intent. We're working to integrate this information with Google Analytics for even easier access. Learn how to track referrer information on our Developer site.

3. Make sure key app resources can be crawled

Blocked resources are one of the top reasons for the “content mismatch” errors you see in Webmaster Tools’ Crawl Errors report. We need access to all the resources necessary to render your app page. This allows us to assess whether your associated web page has the same content as your app page.

To help you find and fix these issues, we now show you the specific resources we can’t access that are critical for rendering your app page. If you see a content mismatch error for your app, look out for the list of blocked resources in “Step 5” of the details dialog:

4. Watch out for Android App errors

To help you identify errors when indexing your app, we’ll send you messages for all app errors we detect, and will also display most of them in the “Android apps” tab of the Crawl errors report.

In addition to the currently available “Content mismatch” and “Intent URI not supported” error alerts, we’re introducing three new error types:

APK not found: we can’t find the package corresponding to the app.
No first-click free: the link to your app does not lead directly to the content, but requires login to access.
Back button violation: after following the link to your app, the back button did not return to search results.

In our experience, the majority of errors are usually caused by a general setting in your app (e.g. a blocked resource, or a region picker that pops up when the user tries to open the app from search). Taking care of that generally resolves it for all involved URIs.

Good luck in the pursuit of appiness! As always, if you have questions, feel free to drop by our Webmaster help forum.

Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst

More Precise Index Status Data for Your Site Variations

Monday, March 31, 2014

Google Publisher Plugin beta: Bringing our publisher products to WordPress

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Cross-posted from the Inside AdSense blog.

We’ve heard from many publishers using WordPress that they’re looking for an easier way to work with Google products within the platform. Today, we’re excited to share the beta release of our official Google Publisher Plugin, which adds new functionality to publishers’ WordPress websites. If you own your own domain and power it with WordPress, this new plugin will give you access to a few Google services — and all within WordPress.

Please keep in mind that because this is a beta release, we’re still fine-tuning the plugin to make sure it works well on the many WordPress sites out there. We’d love for you to try it now and share your feedback on how it works for your site.

This first version of the Google Publisher Plugin currently supports two Google products:

Google AdSense: Earn money by placing ads on your website. The plugin links your WordPress site to your AdSense account and makes it easier to place ads on your site -- without needing to manually modify any HTML code.
Google Webmaster Tools: Webmaster Tools provides you with detailed reports about your pages' visibility on Google. The plugin allows you to verify your site on Webmaster Tools with just one click.

Visit the WordPress.org plugin directory to download the new plugin and give it a try. For more information about the plugin and how to use it, please visit our Help Center. We look forward to hearing your feedback!

Posted by Michael Smith - Product Manager

Switching to the new website verification API

Monday, December 23, 2013

Webmaster level: advanced

Just over a year ago we introduced a new API for website verification for Google services. In the spirit of keeping things simple and focusing our efforts, we've decided to deprecate the old verification API method on March 31st, 2014. The rest of the API will remain unchanged, this only affects the verification method. For more information about verification in general, please see our site verification Help Center article.

One advantage of upgrading to the new API for verification is that it uses the same client libraries as most other Google APIs, which simplifies integration with other apps and tools. Getting started is easy, especially if you're used to other Google APIs:

If you can't wait to try it out and are a fan of command lines, here's a shortcut:

Download and install oacurl.
Authenticate with a Google Account:
$ java -cp oacurl-1.2.0.jar com.google.oacurl.Login \ --scope https://www.googleapis.com/auth/siteverification
Request the verification information:
$ echo '{ "verificationMethod": "FILE", "site": { "identifier": "http://www.example.com", "type": "SITE" } }' | \ java -cp oacurl-1.2.0.jar com.google.oacurl.Fetch \ 'https://www.googleapis.com/siteVerification/v1/token' \ --content-type JSON -X=POST
Create & add the file to your website, then verify:
$ echo '{ "site": { "identifier": "http://www.example.com", "type": "SITE" } }' | \ java -cp oacurl-1.2.0.jar com.google.oacurl.Fetch \ 'https://www.googleapis.com/siteVerification/v1/webResource?verificationMethod=FILE' \ --content-type JSON -X=POST
Done!

We hope this API will make it easier to implement Google site verification in your projects. Should you have any questions, feel free to comment here, or post in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by John Mueller, fan of long command lines & Webmaster Trends Analyst

Verify your site in Webmaster Tools using Google Tag Manager

Monday, June 17, 2013

To do this, you must have "View, Edit, and Manage" account level permissions in Google Tag Manager.

2. On the Verification page, select Google Tag Manager as the verification method and follow the steps on your screen.

3. Click Verify.

And you’re done!

If you’ve got any questions about this verification method, drop by the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster level: IntermediateIf you use Google Tag Manager to add and update your site tags, now you can quickly and easily verify ownership of your site in Webmaster Tools using the container snippet code.Here’s how it’s done:

1. On the Webmaster Tools home page, click Manage site for the site you’d like to verify, then select Verify this site. If you haven’t added the site yet, you can click the Add a site button in the top right corner.

To do this, you must have "View, Edit, and Manage" account level permissions in Google Tag Manager.
2. On the Verification page, select Google Tag Manager as the verification method and follow the steps on your screen.

3. Click Verify.

And you’re done!

If you’ve got any questions about this verification method, drop by the Webmaster Help Forum. Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Domain verification using CNAME records

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Webmaster Level: all
In order to use Google services like Webmaster Tools and Google Apps you must verify that you own the site or domain. One way you can do this is by creating a DNS TXT record to prove your ownership of the domain. Now you can also use DNS CNAME records to verify ownership of your domains. This is a new domain verification option for users that are not able to create DNS TXT records for their domains.
For example, if you own the domain example.com, you can verify your ownership of the domain by creating a DNS CNAME record as follows.

Add the domain example.com to your account either in Webmaster Tools or directly on the Verification Home page.
Select the Domain Name Provider method of verification, then select your domain name provider that manages your DNS records or "Other" if your provider is not on this list.
Based on your selection you may either see the instructions to set a CNAME record or see a link to the option Add a CNAME record. Follow the instructions to add the specified CNAME record to your domain’s DNS configuration.
Click the Verify button.

When you click Verify, Google will check for the CNAME record and if everything works you will be added as a verified owner of the domain. Using this method automatically verifies you as the owner of all websites on this domain. For example, when you verify your ownership of example.com, you are automatically verified as an owner of www.example.com as well as subdomains such as blog.example.com.
Sometimes DNS records take a while to make their way across the Internet. If we don't find the record immediately, we'll check for it periodically and when we find the record we'll make you a verified owner. To maintain your verification status don’t remove the record, even after verification succeeds.
If you don’t have access to your DNS configuration at your domain name provider you can continue to use any of the other verification methods, such as the HTML file, the meta tag or Google Analytics tag in order to verify that you own a site.
If you have any questions please let us know via our Webmaster Help forum.
Posted by Pooja Wagh, Software Engineer

Webmaster Central Blog

Announcing domain-wide data in Search Console

Tie your sites together with property sets in Search Console

The four steps to appiness

2. Understand how your app is doing in search results

3. Make sure key app resources can be crawled

4. Watch out for Android App errors

More Precise Index Status Data for Your Site Variations

Google Publisher Plugin beta: Bringing our publisher products to WordPress

Switching to the new website verification API

Verify your site in Webmaster Tools using Google Tag Manager

Domain verification using CNAME records

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