Altervista tutorials to enable Google Webmaster Tools failed
Dear Altervista,
If I google my name, "Mark Ebden", Google returns mebden.altervista.org rather than mebden.com. I'm trying to fix this problem through site verification of mebden.com. However, I can't verify my website www.mebden.com using your instructions unfortunately. I followed the tutorial for adding meta tags:
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="..." />
and I followed the instructions for adding a Google .html file, at this URL: www.mebden.com/google023c84ac818431e7.html
Neither works, unfortunately. In the first case I got this error message from Google's Search Console: "Verification failed for http://www.mebden.com/ using the Meta tag method (less than a minute ago). We couldn't find the verification meta tag."
In the second case, I got a similar error and when I clicked 'Show found file content', the output was:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd"> <html> <head> <title>mebden.com</title> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, user-scalable=no, initial-scale=1"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <meta name="description" content="mebden.com"> <meta name="keywords" content="Mark Ebden"> <link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="http://mebden.altervista.org/favicon.ico"> </head> <frameset rows="100%,*" cols="100%" frameborder="no" framespacing="0" border="0"> <frame name="XYZZY2" scrolling="auto" src="http://mebden.altervista.org/google023c84ac818431e7.html" noresize> <frame name="XYZZY" scrolling="no" noresize> <noframes> <h1><a href="http://mebden.altervista.org/google023c84ac818431e7.html">http://mebden.altervista.org/google023c84ac818431e7.html</a></h1> <p><a href="http://mebden.altervista.org/google023c84ac818431e7.html">Clicca qui</a> per vedere la versione senza frames.</p> </nofr
Is there something missing from the Altervista tutorials?
Even if you verify the domain, the actual contents will stay on the AlterVista domain, the second level domain is only a redirect. Because of that Google will unlikely show the second level domain in the search results.
Thanks for your quick reply, karl. It was actually straightforward for Google to find the second-level domain in previous websites I've maintained using GoDaddy, Wordpress, and Bluehost for example. I'm relatively new to Altervista however.
If you ever add the missing functionality in future then I'd be pleased to hear. Thanks again.
Last edited by mebden; 01-12-2016 at 09:54 PM.
Reason: concision
Hi, just checking whether this functionality was ever added? Next month I need to decide whether to continue hosting my two pages on Altervista or not, and if Google can't find my second-level domain then I'm afraid it will be hard for me to continue with Altervista as opposed to the many other hosts which do provide this service. Thanks again.