Is anybody else having Gwebmaster tools verify problems?

[David]

From where I sit it appears that Google's Webmaster tools changed something and failed to tell blogspot they changed it.

I use meta tag verification for all my blogs, Gwebaster tools generates a meta string to validate or verify ownership.

I took that Google generated string and entered it into a Google owned blogspot blog and blogspot is rejecting it?

I've got 57 blogspot blogs and verified all of them the same way... What did Google change?

Is anyone else having this problem?

the error msg is saying the xml code is not well formed.. and Google it self gave me the damn code???

Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly.
XML error message: Element type "meta" must be followed by either attribute specifications, ">" or "/>".

[raiko]

Have you tried viewing your blogs' page source so that you can see how the meta tag looks? Perhaps Blogspot is adding (or subtracting) something to the code that is causing a problem. Do you add the meta tag manually or through a widget? Does blogspot append the ">" to the verification code for you? Maybe you end up with 2 ">" or perhaps none. If you view source you should be able to see what the problem is. Browse to your blog and click "view" and "page source" then check out the meta tag and see if it matches up with the other meta tags on the page. Good luck.

[David]

Thanks for your reply, I'm not sure if Google is adding anything.

It is a string provided by Google that has always worked in the past, but doesn't seem to work now.

I do know that the exact same thing happens in the meta string Yahoo provides... it seems that Yahoo is deliberately keeping the number of people using this service low as the left out a trailing slash that one has to manually add to the string to get it to work...
well to get it to be accepted by Google anyway

The damnedest thing is I'm using Google generated code to enter into a Google owned product and it's broken?

Someone at Blogger wasn't told of a change at Webmaster Tools

[raiko]

I use WP and a plugin to insert the validation code from Google. The plugin appends a / to end of the code which caused problems when I first started using it. I would end up with two /'s. Once I figured it out it was ok. Sounds like your problem may be different. Have you tried just uploading a verification file rather than the meta tag code?

[David]

Originally Posted by raiko

I use WP and a plugin to insert the validation code from Google. The plugin appends a / to end of the code which caused problems when I first started using it. I would end up with two /'s. Once I figured it out it was ok. Sounds like your problem may be different. Have you tried just uploading a verification file rather than the meta tag code?

I couldn't upload a verification file, the site in question was a blogspot blog, I did attempt to substitute an individual blog post as if it was an individual file...


Amazingly enough a Google Employee read my post and answered it within 12 hours of my posting the question (I'm hoping that's cause they like me? it's unheard of to even get a question answered let alone that quickly)

Google tech help told me to add a trailing slash by hand and someone would look into why the CMS, script of what ever it is they run failed to do it automatically