Google webmaster Verification failed

Question

I have a site created by Ruby on Rails. I had successfully verified the site with Google Webmaster Tools some months ago. However, recently Webmaster Tools has been asking me to verify my site. I tried again to verify my site using Meta tags and HTML files, but now I cannot get it to successfully verify. The error message I get is:

"Verification failed. The connection to your server timed out."

Since then, Google hasn't been crawling my site's content - though Google still crawls my PDF contents on my site.

Answer 1

Verify that the file name is right. In particular verify that your host isn't converting it to htm instead of html. Try to load the file yourself to ensure that there is not a redirect. Google doesn't follow redirects when verifying for obvious reasons.

Next, check the permissions on the file. Files uploaded at the site root like Google requires are sometimes automatically tagged with permissions that prohibit them being read unless you specifically allow them.

When using the meta tags be sure you don't have a leading or trailing space. This is common if you copy and paste just the verification number rather than the whole tag. Sometimes you end up copying a space in front or back without realizing it.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

I was getting same error then I saw that the extension of google verification file was wrong.So check for the extension of your verification file in your ftp folder.