A few posts ago, I wrote about the Metatags section in the Reseller Control Panel, when the importance of the “verify-v1” and the “y-key” meta tags was discussed.

These tags are used to verify your website(s) with Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer. However, recently Google updated their meta tag verification method. And while most of the changes are at the backend, there are two of them concerning the meta tag verification method itself.

The first one, which is more obvious, concerns the name of the “verify-v1” meta tag, which has been replaced with “google-site-verification”. The presence of this meta tag in the header section of your website is required for all new submissions to Google Webmaster Tools. Websites using the old meta tag, however, will not be required to update it – “verify-v1” is still supported.

After a quick talk with one of our developers, this change has also been reflected in our Reseller Control Panel – instead of “verify-v1” you can now see “google-site-verification”.

The second novelty is that the new meta tag will not change with each account detail change. Up until now, every time someone changed their email address in the account details section, a new “verify-v1” tag was being generated and had to be replaced on the user’s website to be verified once again.