Problem Verifying Search Console
- Tom
- 13th February 2019
Hi everyone,
Ok, let me start from explaining that this is only one of the reasons why Google Search Console can’t verify your the website owner. And because this happened for us a few times I thought would be a good idea to publish this article.
In our case, the problem we encountered was with our .htaccess file and the redirects we have included in the file. From the developers perspective, all the code in the file looked good and returned no errors.
What do you need to do
So the procedure to verify your ownership when we knew whats wrong was a pretty simple from that point. All you have to do is temporarily remove .htaccess from your server. Better still if you replace its code with a standard WP like this one.
# BEGIN WordPressRewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
Before throwing yourself in deep water, please always make sure you back up your database and website file in case something goes wrong!
If you not familiar with FTP you can see this article for help “How to Edit the .htaccess File in WordPress?”
Try to verify again
Please note, we have never used plugins to modify the file – so please don’t quote us on this one. Once this is done please log in to you Search Console and try to verify the ownership again. You may already have Analitycs code there or Google tag but best if you upload the search console code. Once verified, reload your previous .htaccess file (or change the code inside back to what you had) and that’s it. Please remember this occurred for us a few times but this is not “rule of thumb” and the solution for your problem might be different!
Tom
This news item was created by Tom