12th
December
2006
Yesterday I logged into my Google Webmaster Tools account, and every site there, (all of my own and all of my clients) either had a status of “pending verification” or simply said “verify”. Some of these sites have been verified for over a year, so I knew something was really wrong.
A quick check of the Google Groups showed a few others were having this problem, and several people were actually claiming their sites were then being dropped from Google’s index.
Of course, reading that sites were being dropped from the index made me a little concerned, so I attempted reverification of each site, but none would complete. All I got were “system busy” messages, and “please try again later”.
Last night I was on a search engine discussion panel called SEM Hot Seat and I asked a couple of others there if they had ever seen or heard of this problem, and of course, nobody had. When I arrived home, I again tried to verify my sites, but again had no luck.
This morning, the first thing I thought about when my eyes opened was checking this. At 4:50 am, I went downstairs and all things were NOT back to normal.
However, I was able to manually reverify all of my sites. All my stats returned, and things seem normal again. Great. Thanks Google, for wasting about 3 hours of my time yesterday and today.
Were those delisted people removed from the index for something else, or was this some sort of Google glitch that really had put me in danger of having all those websites dropped from Google’s index? Who knows? But for that matter, who cares? Don’t take a chance…
Log in to Google Webmaster Tools and check the verification status of your XML sitemaps. You may be glad you did!
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