Google Site Maps META Tags
Google announced recently on one of their blogs that they are now using META tags for site map validation. I personally think this is a fantastic idea and wish they would have done this from the beginning.
The Google site map program seems to be obsessed with proving that you own the page that you’re tracking. Which all in all is not a bad thing, but initially they do not have enough ways to prove you’re the owner of the site. While they have been adding more ways to validate your site in the past few months the initial way of validation was a file that could be put in the root of your home page.
In my case the site map service would not validate the file because my 404 error messages were not always returning 404 error codes. This was done on purpose and was something that I was unwilling to change.
Interestingly enough I had several of my sites that validated just fine. All the sites were on the same server and all the sites are configured in the exact same way, but for some reason about 25% validated fine while the rest were denied for not returning 404 error codes.
I have not tried the new META tag for site map validation yet as I am currently redesigning the core of many of my sites, but during this redesign I will be implementing the new META tag validation and I look forward to many other new features from site maps as well.
http://sitemaps.blogspot.com/2006/05/more-about-meta-tag-verification.html
