Google Webmasters (and it’s Google Search Console ) provides you with a Domain property verification string to allows you to get the full search data going to your site. The Domain Property shows all the search data for your site in one place rather than (say) separate data for https and http access. It is worth using.
To use this verification string you have to add it as a TXT (or TXT/SPF) record to your sites DNS. Google then looks through the DNS TXT records for your site and when it find the relevant string the site gets verified.
“All” you need to do is create a new DNS TXT record that contains the given Google verification for your site. Put it in the right place, hit the verification button and it all works. But under certain circumstances, even when you have added what you think is a valid TXT record, it fails. As I found out the hard way (twice).
If the name registrar for your site is the same people providing the web-space then this set up is easy and straight-forward. You just add the new TXT (or TXT/SPF) record to your DNS records, using the domain property verification string provided by Google.
My Domain Verification problem.
The problem comes when your name-registrar is different from the provider of your web-space. To get your site to work you will have changed your name-registrar’s DNS records. You will have pointed them at your web-space. You’ll also have changed the name-servers to those of the web-space provider.
In the above scenario if you add the Google Verification TXT record to the name-registrars DNS records for your site, it won’t work.
You must add the Google verification TXT record to the web-space providers DNS for your site. NOT to the name-registrars DNS. If your name-registrar is the same as your web-space host then you don’t have to worry. The DNS record will be the same set for both. Whatever the scenario, usually, for shared hosting, you add the TXT record in the DNS Zone editor.
So in essence the Google TXT record needed to verify your domain property should be added to the LAST set of DNS records encountered on route to your site. Adding it to DNS records before this is a waste of time and will be ignored.
Why is this post here? I forget things. I fixed this problem on a couple of websites. Then by the time I got round to needing to do it again I’d forgotten. Re-learning things is painful. Hence the post.