Using redirect to trick google sitemap verification
By Reaper-X on Aug 12, 2006 in Apache, Google, Google Sitemaps, Internet, SEO, Tutorials, WPMU, Web Servers, Wordpress
Most of the reader especially for those who already has their own webserver maybe already using this redirection just to redirect your old pages to your new homepages. But did you know that by using the 301 redirect you can also trick google sitemap verification process ? .. actually you can do this easily as long as you have access to edit the .htaccess file in your webserver simply by putting this line (and the webserver support this feature)
RedirectMatch 301 ^/google(.*)\.html$ http://examplesite.domain.com
By using that line you tell the webserver to do a permanent redirect to all files named google*.html into the destination server, and by using that simple line there’s no need for you to upload the google sitemap verification file into your server, because every request that made to search a google*.html will be redirected into the destination page without giving a 404 error.
Unfortunately this trick doesn’t work on wordpress since you can’t get access to the .htaccess file .. anyway i hope this trick can be usefull for you ;)
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I would just like to add a word of caution to this somewhat simple method of tricking Google’s verification process: it will allow anyone to verify ownership of your site and give them full access to all statistics, messages and tools available through Webmaster Tools. Especially since you do not see who else has verified ownership of your site, I would not recommend using this kind of redirect.
Heh, so I just noticed your follow-up post about this where you mentioned the same things :-).