wordpress and google sitemaps verification

October 21st, 2006

This is for those who have been struggling to get the Google Sitemaps Verification with their Wordpress blog. Until 10 mins back , i myself was one of those poor souls , who have had the bad luck of getting the dreaded error message from Google where it says ” We’ve detected that your server returns a status of 200 (found successfully) for pages that don’t exist. ” I personally used to have this problem on this personal blog of mine , which i just keep for experimental purposes . It’s not a site through which i make money , but i know of several webmasters , who use Wordpress and blogging as their main source of revenue . For them , getting the site not verified means - less statistics available from Google . Here i would like to mention that , getting your site not verified is ” not the end of the world …. it doesn’t hamper your site’s search engine ranking in any direct way , neither does it directly effect Google’s idea about your website . I am saying this , because i know some people feel getting their sitemap listed will ensure google indexing them . If your site doesn’t get verified , you wont be having all the reports available for websites that are verified .
Now , comign back to the main matter : Google has a detailed FAQ on when you will recieve this error message and how you can solve it , which totally relates handling 404 headers LINK , so i will not go much into it . My problem was i had done everything that was mentioned as resolutions in that page . And i saw that even after modifying my header template in wordpress ( at first i thought it was because i was using the Blix template ) , and even uploading the blank html file , as requested by the system… i was still getting the same error . Quite frustated by this , i tried posting in DP , and also in the Google Sitemaps Group , to no avail . Thankfully i had also posted the scenario in Wordpress support forum too … but for the last 1 month nothing had changed much . Only i saw that another member like me , was also having the same issue and was following the topic more religiously than me . It was in this discussion that someone mentioned that we should as well try disabling all or some of the WordPress Plugins and see if that has any effect …. and it actually did . By trial and error , it became evident that the Wordpress Plugin ( Post Ratings - which in itself was a cool hack ) , which was the culprit and disabling removed Google’s dreaded error msg from the Verification tab in Sitemaps .

Entry Filed under: websites