Google Webmastertool

Google is changing the way they validate sites. They are now requiring the page to contain the contents of the html file and not just the html file name in the URL for the submission to work. I know this impacts all the WordPress.com blog  (mine as well) and we hoped Google or WordPress will do something to fix this.

Here’s the link from WordPress Support forum which has coverage on this issue, here.

for time being, you can still submit your sitemaps to Google to index, here’s how:

type the below in your browser, replace [yourblogurlgoeshere] with your own weblink.

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://[yourblogurlgoeshere]/sitemap.xml

you will received a immediate reply like below:

Sitemap Notification Received

Your Sitemap has been successfully added to our list of Sitemaps to crawl. If this is the first time you are notifying Google about this Sitemap, please add it via http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ so you can track its status. Please note that we do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.

Here is the fix from WordPress support, click ‘fix’ to access the support page with instructions.