Google Site Verification with Wordpress

As with all sites that wish to be found praying to the google gods of horrible user interfaces is required. In that there are several meta tags that your site needs to cough up so that the google bot understands this is a site worthy of its consideration.

There is a list of tags as identified in [1] but this post if going to focus on getting the verification code and planting it in a Wordpress site so that it presents it.

First, the meta tag we want to use is google-site-verification. And as with all things Google finding out how to get one varies, is hard to find, and the documentation is contradictory and confusing. This post is a result of the usual Google misinformation so the next time I need this I can .... well....consult with myself. In this case I finally found that the link at [2] helped. And already having a google analytics account allowed me to generate the verification code.

Essentially I did this:

1. Go to Webmaster Central and click Add a site. Enter the URL of your site. https://www.google.com/webmasters/verification/home
2. Choose alternate methods tab.
3. Select HTML Tag

This generates a tag like this:
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="z0TcgvjhJgg3FArBc8j8CAKMMFRpcW6uFBebbHYKRoE" />

Next I installed a Wordpress plugin called "Meta Tag Manager" [3] and entered the tag information there.

Once this was live in my site and every page was providing the meta tag I could click verify in the Wemaster Central page.

Another page will involve the setup for Google Analytics in my Wordpress site.




References:

1. Meta tags that Google understands, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en
2. Verify site ownership on Google Search Console, https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1142414?hl=en
3. Meta Tag Manager, https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/meta-tag-manager/

Why Your Security Program Fails #1

You have a security group. They are passionate, trained, and competent. But security is still weak based on customer audits. Why?

Reason Number 1:

Your organization only performs security audits late in the quality cycle. Development neither engages nor listens to your security team because of a variety of reasons.

1. A culture of coddling developers so they feel elite, and therefore they know it all so they do not believe they require outside expertise.
2. Your Security team is in a quality group, and are therefore sneered at in North America.
3. Your Agile process has been broken to mean anything to anyone at any given time so therefore its missed as part of the agile cycle.
4.  Your hipster/hideous beard crowd is breaking things at the speed of Google because that's how code is made today.

Based on this any security issue may require a serious redesign. (Really?!, why can't our MongoDB cluster be exposed on the public internet?). Unless of course product managers can sweep it under some other rug.

Blame marketing. That normally works.