WMT asking to verify - again

[wheelie34]

Just logged into WMT and about 50% of my sites need verifying, seems only the sites that use the meta tag verification. The error states a complete different code for example:

Last attempt Jul 22, 2008: Your verification meta tag should be abcabcabcabcacabcabc=.
The meta tag we found was xyzxyzxyzxyzxyz=.

Surely a google fart, I am not changing all those tags, anyone else got the same

[fishfinger]

Yep this happened to me just this week.

[wheelie34]

did you fix or correct it?

[fishfinger]

Fixed it 'coz I was in a hurry and it was only 1 site out of about 50. I note there are other threads about glitches in WMT recently, and reps have publicaly admitted that they have had some issues, so I'd recommend you report this.

[g1smd]

I had to re-verify a site in WMT the other day. I use the "verify site using uploaded HTML file" method.

The WMT error message said that the file returned "200 OK". Huh? I'm not sure why the site is no longer verified (Sidenote: I only looked at the numbers in the filename, didn't note the CASE of the word "Google" in the error message; see below). Clicking the link instantly re-verified the file as OK.

Anyway, there was a request for /GOOGLE46ce6a4b4870a4376.html earlier that day (which shows as a 404 Error in the site stats), instead of the correct filename of /google46ce6a4b4870a4376.html (all lower-case) being requested. As I haven't got access to the raw log files on this site, I can't look into this further.

Notice that the "GOOGLE" part of the URL was requested in upper case, but none of the letters in the hexadecimal number were. Is this a WMT bug, or some sort of attempt at error correction, or perhaps a test to see that the site doesn't simply return 200 OK for any and all URL requests: lower-case should return 200 OK and upper-case should return 404 (except servers using IIS would return 200 OK for both {I use Apache}).

Note that Google also regularly asks for /no_exist46ce6a4b4870a4376.html which appears to be a test of what the standard 404 Error Page looks like.

Note: This isn't the real Google WMT ID number. I changed some of the digits in this example.