How to Use Google Webmaster Tools in WordPress
October 29, 2007 49 Comments
Google has recently started offering more information regarding how they search your site. It is quite helpful. Here is how you go about it.
- Go to the Google Webmaster Tools page
- Sign in to your Google/gmail account (If you need gmail, just email me and ask and I will send you an invite).
- Click “Diagnostics”
- Click on “Verify”
- Click that you want to add the HTML file
- Google will give you an HTML filename to upload
- Copy that filename to the clipboard
- Go to your wordpress dashboard
- Click “Manage”
- Click the “Pages” tab
- Click “Create New Page”
- Name it the name that google provide in step 6 by pasting the name you copied above into the Page Title blank
- Click “Publish”
- Go back to the google webmaster page and click that you have upoladed the HTML file
- Have fun exploring the google webmaster tools
A few things google offers:
- See what errors the google search bot has encountered
- Control the frequency that google scans your website/blog
- View statistics on what search queries have been used to access your site
- See how many people have subscribed via Google reader, iGoogle, and Orkut (Google’s social networking tool)
- See who has linked to your site
- etc
About mattdabbs
Kingdom Living 
Link to Google Websmaster tools is not correct. But thanks for this… you surpass me in technological profundity. 🙂
Does the link work now? I didn’t realize it because I was logged in to gmail. I believe it works now.
Thanks, Matt. This is really cool.
Work for me too…
Thanks.
Worked like a charm… Thanks.
If you WordPress install has already modified your .htaccess to redirect all traffic, Google does not accept WordPress’ response of a 200 when it encoutners a 404. So it’s impossible to verify a site once this is in effect.
What I did was rename .htaccess file, run verify, the file is found, and then return .htaccess file to original name.
I believe once verified they never need to verify again.
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not work for me. i dont know why
it just :
when i crete “googleecfb8ef6732559ea” with no html extension =myblog.com/googleecfb8ef6732559ea/
when i create “googleecfb8ef6732559ea.html” with html
=myblog.com/googleecfb8ef6732559eahtml/
see.. so google cant find -> myblog.com/googleecfb8ef6732559ea.html
Banditoz,
Not really sure why that wouldn’t work. Check Ted’s comment above. That may fix it.
You do have to reverify it from time to time.
I tried this but it still says that my wordpress blog is not verified
It is still working for me. It is probably because you are using blogger and not wordpress.
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You’re a mad scientist! Thanks for this hack — it worked great. I was trying to figure out some odd-ball javascript, but this works perfectly!
Banditoz & Vikram – follow Matt’s step 12 very carefully. Yes, the URL of the page ends up having no “.” before the “html”. But the page title does. At first, it wasn’t working for me either, because I was trying to force a “.html” into my WordPress page’s permalink. But I went back and followed Matt’s instructions exactly, it worked like a charm. Thanks!
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Thanks for this!
I realize this info is about 2 years old. Does Google still provide this service?
Still around and kicking. Just google “webmaster tools”
thanks. It also works for me.
It doesn´t work, I had to use the function: pages-> add new
Roni,
Being a year and a half old, this info is probably out of date by now. Thanks for the update! I am sure that will help someone.
Thansk you matt
Yes, thanks for this! Mine is a wordpress.com hosted blog, not hosted by me, and it seems like a lot of info I find out there applies to the latter, not the former.
So, I was getting hung up on the fact that since I don’t host it, I can’t just upload an HTML file nor add META tags, like the instructions on the Google Analytics page says to do.
And, like Dave Smith, said above, I was also trying very hard to force the .html into the permalink.
After seeing these instructions & comments I realized I didn’t really have to force the .html extension at all. After creating a new page per the instructions here, my permalink looked something like this:
http://mywebsite.com/googleSpecifiedFileName-html/
I was not sure that would work without the dot. But for kicks I just tried substituting the dash with a dot, and removing the trailing forward slash, like this:
http://mywebsite.com/googleSpecifiedFileName.html
And lo and behold, that link worked in my browser too! Probably has something to do with Matt’s step 12, making the title of the page exactly googleSpecifiedFileName.html
Regardless, no need to worry if the URL doesn’t have a .html, try it anyway and it should work.
Thanks again!
Thanks for this, made my life easy.
To make it work I had to modify my theme (it was a bit more complicate that usally because I have a theme based on Carrington).
I explain how I did (http://www.federico-tomassetti.it/?p=45)
The permalink on my wordpress site keeps the trailing slash (you cant get rid of it). I am wondering if this is why it wont work?
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thanks for the information on placing webmaster code into the site.
I have a wordpress.com and this is not working for me. The code google webmaster tool gave me is not like the ones in the previous post or instructions. Please forgive me, I’m very much a beginner.
Thanks
This post is great. thank you for sharing these helpful infos. I appreciate your work man
hi i am using google webmaster tool for own wordpress website . when we change our parmalink structure in wordpress admin area. my webmaster account show a lots of cowl 404 not fount error . i think all of this url are old. google webmaster tool does not update automatic sitemap .xml file. how we can remove all these old url ?
please help me?
Alan,
I am not so sure with hosted blogs. Read Gayle’s comments above and that may help you with part of your problem. Other than that, I am not sure what to say!
Grete post I love the query tool from webmaster tool as well. It really gives good insight on rankings. However, I can”t seem to have access data from more than 5 weeks before current date??? Am I the only one?
Potentially the previous version of the tool was better for ranking trends over time.
I haven’t used in recently enough to know. There are a few subscribers to this thread so maybe someone will read this and have an answer for you. Wish I could be of more help.
I can’t seem to get this to work, google refuses it as its looking at the content of the page 😦
Hi
i am facing a problem in Google webmaster tool. my WordPress blog tags feed are not properly indexes in Google webmaster tool. webmaster tool show Crawl errors 404 not found, it takes tag title in URl , while actual URl of tag feed are slug .
webmaster takes URl is — http://www.mysiteexample.com/tag/high performance/feed
its take tag title in URl field
while actualURl is http://www.mysiteexample.com/tag/ high-performance/feed
ie slug of tag
please help me how we can correct this in webmaster tool.
HI —
I’ve tried every which way to get my WP site verified — all failed. I tried creating new page in WP with code — didn’t work.
I tried uploading the .html page on my FTP — got error message.
I considered inserting verification code in my home page source code — don’t know how to do that.
Thanks for any help you can give.
John
I’ve tried this on my wordpress site hosted by me and have no luck with verifying my website. I even tried to change the -html extension to .html and it wont save. Wish there was another easy way to do this?
it doesn’t work…. i had tried many times.
This post is really old now so things have probably changed since it was written.
I installed the plugin called “Google Sitemap XML” on my wordpress site, it builds my sitemap.xml file and tells me that Google, Bing and Yahoo are now notified of my website. Do I still need to follow the instructions above, or has this plugin done the job for me?
You may still want to access google webmaster tools. It gives you some great data like which search terms are getting people to your site among many other things.
Didn’t work for me, is there an update on this subject? I tried pasting the code in a new page as a title and on the page but it doesn’t work for me. I have a wordperss.com site and can’t edit the metatags, can someone please help me?
I can recommend to visit to you a site on which there are many articles on this question.
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Very good article. I’m experiencing a few of these issues as well..
Merely wanna tell that this is very beneficial,
Thanks for taking your time to write this.
Helpful information. Fortunate me I discovered your site
by chance, and I’m shocked why this accident did not took place earlier!
I bookmarked it.