I’m not an internet neophyte.
My first personal computer was an Apple II+. At least, I think that’s what its name was, so much time has passed. I started using the world wide web as soon as a dial-up log in became available through the city library here in Salem, Oregon. I’ve been blogging since 2002, a near-eternity in internet years.
But while I’m competent with using and maintaining a computer, when it comes to the technical aspects of HTML, DNS, and other acronyms whose inner workings still largely mystify me, I’ve got a hell of a lot to learn. And that’s putting it mildly.
Here’s a hot-off-the-keyboard example from today.
A bit over three weeks ago I wrote about the successful migration of my 8,400 blog posts, tens of thousands of comments, and 12,000 photos (I have three blogs) from the Typepad platform to new WordPress blogs — thanks to the expert work of Glorywebs, a company based in India that handled all that in eight days at a very reasonable cost.
The Glorywebs SEO team said that I should prevent search engines from accessing the WordPress content until Typepad shut down permanently on September 30. The reason is that when I switched from a different blogging platform to Typepad in 2003, for a while there were exact duplicates of my blog posts on both platforms, since I needed time to copy and paste from the old platform to the new platform.
That caused my Google search rankings to tank. Apparently the Great God Google didn’t like having duplicate blog posts on the internet. Maybe it looked like I was trying to game the search engine system. Anyway, Glorywebs agreed that I should wait until Typepad had gone bye-bye before undertaking five steps Glorywebs sent me about activating the search engine presence for my three blogs.
That happened last Wednesday, October 1. Anyone looking for my blogs encountered a “Typepad is out of business” message. I immediately did the first three steps: (1) Confirm Site Visibility, (2) Check Robots.txt, (3) Generate & Submit Sitemap
Then I hit Step 4 — Verify in Google Search Console. The first three sub-steps were: (1) Log in to Google Search Console, (2) Add your site (if not already), (3) Verify ownership (via DNS, HTML file upload, or Google Analytics). That’s where things went awry.
I decided to go the DNS route, because I couldn’t figure out where, or how, to add the Google HTML file to my WordPress blogs. Even some Googling didn’t reveal an answer. At least, not one that I was comfortable attempting. For example, I read on Reddit that the HTML file should go in the WordPress theme file. But some Reddit users said that wouldn’t work, that the HTML file should go in a “child” theme.
At that confusing point I decided to pursue the DNS option. That required logging into my domain name service, Network Solutions. I handled that easily. For each of my blogs, I had a mysterious string of characters that the Google Search Console had generated that needed to be added to the DNS (Domain Name System) file.
When I clicked on that within the Network Solutions site, I was met with a scary message that basically said, “Screw around with this stuff at your risk; if you mess up, you may cause your web sites to be inoperable.” That spurred me to look for a support document that would walk me through the process of adding the Google Search Console txt. file to my DNS file.
You can read the support document section called “Verify Domain Name via Domain DNS.” It seems to be a public document, though I could be wrong about that. The only problem was that the document didn’t say what I should do with an option where I had to choose what prefix came before my domain name. In the case of this blog, before hinesblog.com Seeing that www was an option, I chose that, since www.hinesblog.com leads to this WordPress blog.
That just felt right to me. A feeling I should have mistrusted after 24 hours went by and I wasn’t able to verify ownership of my domain name in Google Search Console. I keep getting an error message. Then 48 hours went by. Then 72 hours went by, the upper limit of how long it takes for a DNS change to propagate, according to some Googling I did.
Today, the fourth freaking day after I made the DNS change to my domain names, I finally contacted Network Solutions support. Though it was Sunday, after a wait of a few minutes I was chatting with Akarsh, who I suspect was in India. It didn’t take Akarsh long to identify the problem. I should have chosen @ to put before my URLs, not www.
I asked Akarsh to make that change to my three domain names. He, or maybe she, said that it would 4-6 hours for the now-correct addition of the Google Search Console txt file to my DNS information to propagate. When I checked after about 8 hours, yay!, my three domain names were verified. So now the Great God Google should look kindly upon me, thanks to Akarsh — who I bestowed 5-star reviews on when I was asked to rate the quality of his support.
What’s strange is that even after I Googled “use @ for txt file generated by Google Search Console DNS verification option,” no result popped out at me. That’s one reason I wrote this blog post. If I can save someone else from wasting four days waiting for Google Search Console verification of domain name ownership because something other than @ preceded the DNS domain name URL, I’ll feel that my mistake wasn’t in vain.
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