Go Daddy ASP.NET Hosting and Google WebMaster Tools Verification

Saturday, September 04 2010 - ,

Recently I ran into a minor problem trying to get google webmaster tools setup on a GoDaddy.com account. I was trying to Verify the account via the Upload an HTML file option.

Rather than upload the file I tried to simply copy the contents and file name via GoDaddy's control panel.

In order to do that you have to:

Login to your www.godaddy.com account

Select File Management

Add New File

Paste the content into the file

Click save and give the file a name

The result is something like this:

godaddy_webmaster

The problem I had was that verification failed because the file content was incorrect. Looking at the file via GoDaddy it looked correct. Then I went to source view and found that the editor had wrapped the content with some standard HTML tags. I removed them, saved and tried again… still failed. We back and looked at the file again and sure enough the editor re-added the HTML tags.

How stupid. I renamed the file to be something other than .HTML (e.g. HTMLX) then copy and pasted the content and renamed the file back to HTML and it worked fine.

Of course by this time I could have much more quickly just FTP’d the file.