(5)
It appears like the Google Webmaster Central team is testing a new verification process for Webmaster Tools.
A Google Groups thread reports finding the following data in his log file:
66.249.71.119 - - [11/Sep/2008:10:17:09 +0100] "GET / google38b4a154a92b0b4f.html HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"66.249.71.119 - - [11/Sep/2008:10:17:09 +0100] "GET /fdfdkll.html HTTP/ 1.1" 404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http:// www.google.com/bot.html)"
Googler, JohnMu, said that this is related to Google testing a new verification process:
The accesses of "/fdfdkll.html" were made by an experimental new system that is set to complement / replace the existing Webmaster Tools verification system. In the future, the requests should change to the more common "/noexist(...)" that we're used to. I'm glad to see that progress is being made on the verification system :-), thanks for bringing it up!
Google Webmaster Tool's current verification process was always been someone awkward for webmasters to get working and share with their clients. So here is hoping to a better system soon!
Forum discussion at Google Groups.
Comments:
James
09/12/2008 09:47 pm
"was always been someone awkward" What are you on about? What's the point of your post? How come the verification process has been hard for any webmaster? Come on..
Barry Schwartz
09/12/2008 09:56 pm
Sure James. The way you give others access to see and login to the webmaster tools section to see info about a specific site is not so simple. It is a common Q, how do I give my client or SEO company access to see the reports under their own Google account? How do I limit their access? etc.
James
09/12/2008 11:06 pm
OK I understand, but I don't think client really want to see google webmaster tools, and anyway if a seo company wants an additionnal access, one simply have to create a second file, the one asked by google on the second account. I don't see any issue. But more than that I don't understand the main point of this post, I went to read the thread but it's like nothing is being discussed :-)
Burgo
09/14/2008 10:25 pm
"Google Webmaster Tool's current verification process was always been someone awkward for webmasters" Heh. Barry, were you using voice recognition for this post? I'm almost certain that should read: Google Webmaster Tool's current verification process <b>has</b> always been <b>somewhat</b> awkward for webmasters...
g1smd
09/20/2008 11:14 pm
In Google Analytics you can let additional users look at the data, and either assign them as an Admin (where they can change stuff) or as a User (where they can only look). In WMT you can create extra users, but they all get the rights to tinker with stuff, and set preferences (like www and non-www preferences, geographical target area, crawl rate, remove URLs, and so on). What would happen if one user set the settings one way, and another set them a different way? Would the system flag up the clash of settings in all of the profiles? I started noticing the requests for /fdfdkll.html several weeks ago, but hadn't tied that down to having come from Google (hadn't looked to see where they came from). There were only two requests at that time. Having looked at the 404 Error Logs again there were several identical requests in early and mid August as well. I do see Google still requesting the numbered "google" .html filename for a profile that was removed from WMT more than a month ago. They are also requesting the correct "google" and "noexist" numbered filenames for the profile that is still active for the site. No idea why they still request the file for the account that no longer has access to this site. The account does still exist, and does still have access to other sites. Finally, exported CSV data files from WMT continue to have a time-stamp that is slow by 14 hours (at other times of the day it is wrong by only 7 or 8 hours - can't remember right now) for UK users with time-zone set to UTC+0000 in Google preferences. Right now, at 23:10 UTC Google wants to send me a file labeled with the time as 09:10 Z.