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
-
When Deployment done for my site in google analytic page views little bit affected
Hello Expert, For my ecommerce site every minute I have 500 visitors now when my development team do deployment like minor JS update where site restart not require then what I found is on website (front end) not able to find anything happen that means visitor not event realize page even refresh but in analytic real time it shows minor pageviews down. So can anyone guess here what happen actually in this case as per google? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | micey1230 -
Site relaunch and impact on SEO
I have some tough decisions to make about a web site I run. The site has seen around for 20 years (September 1995, to be precise, is the date listed against the domain). Over the years, the effort I've expanded on the site has come and gone, but I am about to throw a lot of time and effort back into it. The majority of the content on the site is pretty dated, isn't tremendously useful to the audience (since it's pretty old) and the site design and URL architecture isn't particularly SEO-friendly. In addition, I have a database of thousands vendors (for the specific industry this site serves). I don't know if it's a factor any more but 100% of the links there have been populated by the vendors themselves specifically requesting inclusion (through a form we expose on the site). When the request is approved, the vendor link shows up on the appropriate pages for location (state) and segment of the industry. Though the links are all "opt-in" from vendors (we've never one added or imported any ourselves), I am sure this all looks like a terrible link farm to Google! And some vendors have asked us to remove their link for that reason 🙂 One final (very important) point. We have a relationship with a nationwide brand and have four very specific pages related to that brand on our site. Those pages are essential - they are by far the most visited pages and drive virtually all our revenue. The pages were put together with SEO in mind and the look and feel is very different to the rest of the site. The result is, effectively, a site-within-a-site. I need to carefully protect the performance of these pages. To put some rough numbers on this, the site had 475,000 page views over the last year, with about 320,000 of those being to these four pages (by the way, for the rest of the content "something happened" around May 20th of last year - traffic almost doubled overnight - even though there were no changes to our site). We have a Facebook presence and have put a little effort into that recently (increasing fans from about 10,000 last August to nearly 24,000 today, with a net gain of about 2,500 per month currently). I don't have any sense of whether that is a meaningful resource in the big picture. So, that's the background. I want to totally revamp the broader site - much improved design, intentional SEO decisions, far better, current and active content, active social media presence and so on. I am also moving from one CMS to another (the target CMS / Blog platform being WordPress). Part of me wants to do the following: Come up with a better plan for SEO and basically just throw out the old stuff and start again, with the exception of the four vendor pages I mentioned Implement redirection of the old URLs to new content (301s) Just stop exposing the vendor pages (on the basis that many of the links are old/broken and I'm really not getting any benefit from them) Leave the four important pages exactly as they are (URL and content-wise) I am happy to rebuild the content afresh because I have a new plan around that for which I have some confidence. But I have some important questions. If I go with the approach above, is there any value from the old content / URLs that is worth retaining? How sure can I be there is no indirect negative effect on the four important pages? I really need to protect those pages Is throwing away the vendor links simply all good - or could there be some hidden negative I need to know about (given many of the links are broken and go to crappy/small web sites, I'm hoping this is just a simple decision to make) And one more uber-question. I want to take a performance baseline so that I can see where I started as I start making changes and measure performance over time. Beyond the obvious metrics like number of visitors, time per page, page views per visit, etc what metrics would be important to collect from the outset? I am just at the start of this project and it is very important to me. Given the longevity of the site, I don't know if there is much worth retaining for that reason, even if the content changes radically. At a high level I'm trying to decide what questions I need to answer before I set off on this path. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | MarkWill0 -
Why would our client's site be receiving significant levels of organic traffic for a keyword they do not rank for?
We have a client that has received 100+ organic visits for the keyword 'airport transfers', yet the site does not rank in the top 100 search results for this keyword. We have checked that it is not untagged PPC traffic. Truly baffling. Can anybody help?
Reporting & Analytics | | mrdavidingram0 -
Google Webmaster. Backlinks
GWMT only shows that there are 3 domains pointing to a site of mine. I'm looking under "Links to site". But this can't be true because the site is pretty old and I know there are hundreds of domains that point to this one. What would explain this discrepancy? And is there some other free tool that will show all the backlinks? I've used Opensite explorer but that tool isn't close to comprehensive as GWMT usually is (based on other sites I've analyzed)
Reporting & Analytics | | priceseo0 -
Schema Rich Snippet Markup tool is validating the markup but it says it isn't in Webmaster Tools.
All my Schema Rich Snippets are being validated in the webmaster tools Rich Snippet tester tool here http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets But when I go take a peek at the new tab in Webmaster tools when I'm signed into my analytics account it shows there are no active Markups on my site. Has anyone else been having this issue? If it says it's working in the Google tool from the link above should I even be worried if its not showing up when I'm signed into my analytics account? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | DCochrane0 -
Webmaster Tools shows 0 visits, Analytics shows 1000s?
Webmaster Tools reported a "Big traffic change for top URL" for one of our sites about three and a half weeks ago. WT traffic is 0 since that date. However, our analytics data shows no significant decline in traffic. The WT alert was received on Nov. 16. There was a significant dip in GA visits Nov. 22 but it recovered and I'm seeing no other indication that this is a penalty. What could be going on?
Reporting & Analytics | | IMM0 -
Which tool will achieve this...
I need to look at another sites traffic and figure out where they are getting it... Is this possible? Which tool would accomplish this ?
Reporting & Analytics | | JML11790 -
Indexed URLs in Webmaster Tools
Hi everybody! I've been looking at my Webmaster Tools stats, and it looks like not all the URLs in the sitemap tree have been indexed, according to WMT at least. Is this reliable, and if so, is it worth investigating further? | Sitemap | Status | Type | Downloaded | URLs submitted | URLs in web index |
Reporting & Analytics | | neooptic
| | /ISitemap1.xml | | Sitemap | Dec 15, 2011 | 2,000 | 1,309 |
| | /isitemap.xml | | Index | Dec 15, 2011 | 8,695 | 4,127 |
| | /isitemap2.xml | | Sitemap | Dec 15, 2011 | 2,000 | 998 |
| | /isitemap3.xml | | Sitemap | Dec 15, 2011 | 2,000 | 819 |
| | /isitemap4.xml | | Sitemap | Dec 15, 2011 | 2,000 | 719 |
| | /isitemap5.xml | | Sitemap | Dec 15, 2011 | 695 | 282 | Thanks!0