In order to verify your site with google you need to go to Google’s Webmaster Tools Dashboard and add your website and then click verify. After clicking verify it will ask you to put a file on your website with a name similar to google54fbcc37db740a4d.html. In most cases this is all that needs to be done and then google can verify that you are the owner.

If you are using permalinks with WordPress it is not so easy to get Google to verify your site. There are two items that are causing validation to not work with WordPress. First, Google is trying to access more than just google54fbcc37db740a4d.html it is also trying to request a page that does not exist. When I tested it, Google was also asking for noexist_54fbcc37db740a4d.html. You might notice that Google just replaced the word “google” with “noexist_”. Second, WordPress is taking a request for any page (including ones that do not exist) and trying to find an appropriate page and is therefore not returning a 404 error. These two problems cause Google to respond with the following error when you try to validate your site.

We’ve detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a status of 200 (Success) in the header.

 The code that causes WordPress to not return a 404 for an invalid page is the following which is in an .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

After creating your file google54fbcc37db740a4d.html and adding it to your server you just have to modify the above .htaccess file to have it not redirect the request for noexist_54fbcc37db740a4d.html to index.php. You also need to specify a specific page or message to display when a 404 error occurs. You can do that by replacing the above code with the following code.

RewriteEngine On
ErrorDocument 404 "This page does not exist"
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{request_uri} !^/noexist_54fbcc37db740a4d.html$ [nc]
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Make sure you replace the 54fbcc37db740a4d in the above code with the same characters of the file that google tells you to add to your website.