: Verification rejected Why can't I verify my website with Google? google says:- Verification failed for my site using the Meta tag method (less than a minute ago:. Your site's home page returns

@LarsenBagley505

It turns out (according to Opera 11 web browser for Linux) that attempting several URL's results in the same home page being loaded. This makes me think you have an awkward configuration setup on the server.

If your server is apache, then check httpd.conf and look for all files in connection to it to see if there are any lines starting with RewriteRule or similar.

If you see a line similar to any of these:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /homepagecontent.php [L]
RewriteRule .* /homepagecontent.php [L]
RewriteRule ^.*$ /homepagecontent.php [L]


then its a sure sign that its the cause because those rules mean treat any URL as if a remote user wanted to load the homepage PHP script.

What I recommend since you're unsure of locating log files is to reset the configuration on the server so that trying to access something like...
www.saranshsingh.com/sdggdsfhdsfs

...will result in a page other than the home page. Ideally, the user should see an error page indicating the URL was not found along with an HTTP 404 status code returned to the web browser.

Once that is functioning, then create a blank file and save it as robots.txt and upload it to the document root folder (the same folder that contains the script that loads the current HTML to the screen). Then for google site verification, download the file it recommends, save it to the server in the document root folder as-is and test it. Once that works, have google verify it.

If google still has issues, then check the firewall to see if google's IP addresses are being handled differently from the rest of the IP addresses, and if so, then reconfigure the firewall.

And the server logs are access_log and error_log if apache is installed. In them are IP addresses that attempted to access the server after passing through the firewall.

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