How To Upload A Verification File To Blog

Have you noticed you can now verify your website on Pinterest?

(If you don't already, you can follow me on Pinterest here.)

Verifying your website on Pinterest is a good for bloggers. Once verified, Pinterest will prominently display the blog web address, which should help bloggers engage with others and "brand" their page. (By increasing our credibility and hopefully traffic too.) It is also excellent for SEO since it will give you a valuable link back from Pinterest.

The verifiacation feature has actually been available for about a month now, but Bloggers on the Blogger platform haven't been able verify their website because we can't upload files to our server. (Or at least we couldn't do it without some serious tech savviness…)

Pinterest has now made it possible for those of us on the blogger platform to easily verify our websites using an HTML Meta Tag! Yea!

It's a fairly simple process, and I will walk you through it (to the best of my ability) with a few screen shots…

Get the tutorial after the jump…

*** Update! Make sure you are in the "old look" of Pinterest when you start this, for some reason the code generated when you are in the "new look" is causing some people problems…***
Log in to your Pinterest account and go to settings:

Scroll down to Verify Website and click the button.

On the next page you will have the option to download an HTML file or to Verify with an HTML Meta Tag.

Click the option to verify with a Meta Tag. You will see the following:

Select and copy your meta tag. (It is the code in the gray box.)

You will see a warning message, click proceed.

Click the button to expand widget templates.

(Before making any changes to your HTML code, always make a copy. There is a back up restore button on the Template page, click it to download your backup copy and save it somewhere safe.)

Hit CNRL F and search for the word "head ".

You should find two – the opening head tag: <head> and the closing head tag: </head>

Your Pinterest generated code needs to go somewhere in between these 2 tags

Paste the Meta Tag info below the opening HEAD tag. <head> (But above the closing </head> tag.)

A few commenters have mentioned the verification only worked for them when they put the code directly below the opening head tag, so be sure to put the Pinterest generated code to right below the opening head tag. (I think it must depend on what other coding "stuff" you have in this area…)

Test your changes to make sure you didn't mess up your blog. To do this, click preview and make sure it loads properly. Then click save template.

Head back over to Pinterest and click the click here button for Pinterest to verify your site.

That is it, if it worked, you are verified! Head back to your main page to check it out!

Since we are on the subject of blog maintenance… Please take a moment and verify that you are not a no-reply blogger. (Can you believe almost half of the commenters below are no-reply?)
Click this link for the tutorial: Check your settings!

Good luck and please remember I am not a professional, so proceed with caution!

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