This post was published in September 2011, so the information in the post or about me in the sidebar may no longer be correct.

Site verification

01PM, Thursday September 22, 2011 Tags:

Screenshot of a root directory of a web server

Is it just the root of my server that looks a bit like this? With the upcoming launch of Twitter’s analytics service for website owners (which will presumably require some kind of verification), I was wondering:

Why isn’t there a standard, similar to robots.txt, for verifying that you own a domain? verification.txt?

Screenshot of an example verification.txt file

google: Pt8rpfeQC4SCyzABFilZiJC5Tqw8f
googlehosted: Rb0S6k5si3nOj5rVfPmnzU0pYit
bing: eXB4oWQR1iVLtKp6Yk2hTq7N7JPjmoX5
yahoo: y_key_uyxZucu9dvrzsr3PWaYx9G5gLT
twitter: rqcSmFJIlugbPjXvI6vGuZi7YCiWXYR

I can’t think of a reason each service needs more than a few alphanumeric characters for this.

Comments can be sent by email or posted on Twitter, mentioning @alexmuller.