Webmaster Tools Suddenly Asking For Verification of Site Registered for 5 Years
-
Google Webmaster Tools has been successfully installed on my website, (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) for more than five years. Suddenly, today I have received a request to Verify this Site". This makes no sense.
The only possibility I can think of is that this is somehow tied to the following events in the last month:
1. Launch of new version of website on June 4th
2. Installation of Google of Tag Manager
3. Sudden Increase in number of pages indexed by Google. Unexplained indexing of an additional 175 pages. About 625 pages should be indexed, while 800 are now indexed.In the last month ranking and traffic have fallen sharply. Could it be tat these issues are all linked? But the strangest issue is the request to verify the site.
Does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks,
Alan -
True. Could be that you were using a method that required reverification after a Google-determined time period.
"1. Launch of new version of website on June 4th"
Since you launched the new website, did someone check to make sure all the tracking data was moved over as well? If you were using a meta tag, did you insert the same meta tag in the header of the new site? Or if using the file upload, did someone upload the file?
"3. Sudden Increase in number of pages indexed by Google. Unexplained indexing of an additional 175 pages. About 625 pages should be indexed, while 800 are now indexed.
In the last month ranking and traffic have fallen sharply. Could it be tat these issues are all linked? But the strangest issue is the request to verify the site."
If you just lauched a new website, check to make sure you have canoncial links enabled and working. If you are using a cms, and the old site was HTML (or anything static and not database-driven) could be you have a ton of stuff indexed you don't know about. This could also be influencing yoru traffic loss, as Google will see these additional pages as duplicates.
Example:
yourdomain.com
www.yourdomain.com
www.yourdomain.com/home...could possibly all be showing the same page.
-
This has happened to me before, i just download the new file and upload it and all the data was there, are you using html or a wordpress site?
-
How was your site verified in the past? Is there a meta tag or html verification that might have gotten accidentally removed? It's been a while, but I think I've seen this happen just on its own, with GWT occasionally wanting you to reverify, even if nothing has changed. The html file was there, so I just hit reverify and everything was fine.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Need help Taking my Site to the Next Level
Any, and I mean ANY suggestions would be Great and Welcome, Good and Bad. Have a Good site, with what I believe good content, and just stuck at the same level for over 6 months. Please and Thank you for taking a few minute of time out of your day on this. Joe https://www.surecretedesign.com/
Reporting & Analytics | | surecreteproucts0 -
Why are these sites outranking me?
I've been hit by every update and have spent thousands of $ and hundreds of hours trying to survive. Survival looks doubtful if I can't get turned around in 4 weeks or less. I have found adwords and google errors and fixed them. Alexa says us-nano.com is the best ranked site. I used my moz bar and they are doing everything wrong, keyword stuffing, no H1's tags, poor design. How are they ranking & I'm not? My duplicate meta tags are from this week when I added alexa and bing ID's to my header to verify my site ownership. http://imgur.com/a/I1bsw I1bsw
Reporting & Analytics | | cheaptubes0 -
Increase in 404 errors in Webmaster Tools
We have recently updated our website www.cooke.co.uk and twice webmaster tools have reported an increase in 404 errors. However, these errors are not for normal pages, they are things like http://www.cooke.co.uk/?post_type=crown_enquiry&p=1045 I have used the redirection tool in WordPress to redirect all these links to the homepage but does anyone know why this is happening since it is the second time I had to do it. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | AAttias0 -
Why My Site Got 1000% increase in organic traffic from day to night?
Did Google run any update Monday or recently? My site www.shirts4geek.com, strangely had a 1000% organic traffic increase from day to night. I didn't do anything in this site for long a time... but Monday I had a lot traffic coming from organic and every other day this week the site is doing extremely well on traffic and sales. I'm ranking first page for many keywords relate to my products. I wish I could figure out what happens so I can replicate it. The site has very links and the On Page Optimization is kind of basic. Does any have any idea how it could be possible? Have any one seen something similar lately?
Reporting & Analytics | | Felip30 -
Have You Ever Gotten False or Odd Notifications from Google Webmaster Tools?
I just got an email for one of my client websites from Google Webmaster Tools letting me know that the Google Bot could not access the website? The notification indicated that there may be a robots.txt issue that prevented crawling, but that they would try something to crawl it again. In this situation, we had just created a new Webmaster Tools account for the client, and there were (are) two GWT accounts now for the website, one that is incorrectly set to http://clientwebsite.com and the other that is set to www.clientwebsite.com. One of them reports zero errors, and the other reports an odd crawl error. Anyone encountered this type of thing before?
Reporting & Analytics | | williammarlow0 -
Difference between site: search and Total Indexed in Google Webmaster Tools.
This morning I did a search on Google for my site using the site: operator. I noticed that the number of results returned was significantly different than the "Total indexed" in Google Webmaster Tools. What is the difference and is it normal to have two very different numbers here?
Reporting & Analytics | | Gordian0 -
Any thoughts on why Nextag and MonsterMarketPlace are linking to our site?
I'm looking in WMT at the crawl errors and I noticed that our website has gotten a lot of Not Found crawl errors that seem strange. A lot of these not found pages are Display URLs that I use in PPC advertising, but not actual redirects (i.e. explorica.com/EducationalTrips). When I looked at how these links were being found, the inbound links were coming from Nextag.com and monstermarketplace.com, two sites that our company has never had a relationship with. We're an educational travel company, so we'd have no reason to. When I followed the links, it looks like it's coming from their "Sponsored Links," but these aren't Google or Bing Ads. We don't even advertise on the content network. Example link: http://www.monstermarketplace.com/starters-and-alternators/alternator-motorola-style-12v-51a-10376 (the ads do rotate so my site might not appear when you check it out). Anyone ever had experience with this type of issue?
Reporting & Analytics | | Explorica0 -
Site speed not being reported accurately?
We're constantly on the lookout for site speed, and Google's Webmaster tools are saying that we're really really slow (on the order of 5-15 seconds per page). But the site NEVER feels that slow, and lots of other tools say we're in the 3-5 second range. Further, we've implemented literally 100% of Google's suggestions, and all we have are ad units that now render using Googles Async ad loader, further reducing time to interactivity. Could Google be dinging us in search results for this? Here's an example page that they said loaded in 200+ seconds (!?!) http://hark.com/clips/kwkdqqtzsg-terran-nuclear-launch-detected Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | TheIronYuppie0