Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.Hello, I am having trouble getting a new site verified by google. My sites are multi-site and other sites sharing the same code base have previously been set up and successfully verified with the code.
I have enabled the module on the new site and on google's verify page selected html file verification and added the filename google requests. When I click verify, it comes back and says that the contents of my file are wrong.
Google wants the file to contain: "google-site-verification: (my filename code here).html" whereas the file the module is creating says: "Hello, Google!".
I am not sure if this is a new change for them or if I am just being stupid (again :)
Any suggestions?
Thanks!
Comments
Comment #1
dave reidYes this was a recent change in the verification method used by Google. This functionality has been removed from XML sitemap in the latest code (awaiting release) in favor of the Site verification module.
Comment #2
maddentim commentedOk, makes sense. I'll try the Site verification module. Do I leave the XML Sitemap Engines submodule of the XML Sitemap module enabled? or is that no longer needed?
Comment #3
dave reidIf you want to have your sitemap automatically submitted, leave it enabled. Make sure that after you enable the Site Verification module that the verifications in XML sitemap engines were automatically and properly removed for you (report back here if not).
Comment #5
hambers commented@1
Until "latest changes released" (the next version after 6.x-1.1) you can use the Site Verification Module to create/upload the verification file - OK.
But you must also set the Google Verification Link setting to blank otherwise the "Hello Google!" content is still output. The 'Google Verification Link setting' is the setting on Search Engines tab of the Admin / Site Configuration / XML Sitemaps admin page.
Comment #6
hambers commentedComment #7
dave reidOnce you install the site verification module, it should automatically import settings from XML sitemap engines and disable those module's settings.
Comment #8
hambers commentedYes I noticed that the Site Verification module imported the settings from XML sitemap.
However doesn't appear to disable those settings correctly. As I mentioned, if the 'Google Verification Link setting' is set the XML sitemap settings the file that is rendered is the old style "Hello Google" file. So it looks like a problem with the Site Verification module not disabling the XML sitemap settings correctly.
Comment #9
dave reidYeah I confirmed that site_verify didn't actually *delete* the variables from the XML sitemap engines sub-module. I've fixed the problem in site_verify's CVS.