Webmaster Tools Suddenly Asking For Verification of Site Registered for 5 Years

[Kingalan1]

Google Webmaster Tools has been successfully installed on my website, (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) for more than five years. Suddenly, today I have received a request to Verify this Site". This makes no sense.

The only possibility I can think of is that this is somehow tied to the following events in the last month:

1. Launch of new version of website on June 4th
2. Installation of Google of Tag Manager
3. Sudden Increase in number of pages indexed by Google. Unexplained indexing of an additional 175 pages. About 625 pages should be indexed, while 800 are now indexed.

In the last month ranking and traffic have fallen sharply. Could it be tat these issues are all linked? But the strangest issue is the request to verify the site.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,
Alan

[David-Kley]

True. Could be that you were using a method that required reverification after a Google-determined time period.

"1. Launch of new version of website on June 4th"

Since you launched the new website, did someone check to make sure all the tracking data was moved over as well? If you were using a meta tag, did you insert the same meta tag in the header of the new site? Or if using the file upload, did someone upload the file?

"3. Sudden Increase in number of pages indexed by Google. Unexplained indexing of an additional 175 pages. About 625 pages should be indexed, while 800 are now indexed.

In the last month ranking and traffic have fallen sharply. Could it be tat these issues are all linked? But the strangest issue is the request to verify the site."

If you just lauched a new website, check to make sure you have canoncial links enabled and working. If you are using a cms, and the old site was HTML (or anything static and not database-driven) could be you have a ton of stuff indexed you don't know about. This could also be influencing yoru traffic loss, as Google will see these additional pages as duplicates.

Example:
yourdomain.com
www.yourdomain.com
www.yourdomain.com/home

...could possibly all be showing the same page.

[benjaminmarcinc]

This has happened to me before, i just download the new file and upload it and all the data was there, are you using html or a wordpress site?

[KeriMorgret]

How was your site verified in the past? Is there a meta tag or html verification that might have gotten accidentally removed? It's been a while, but I think I've seen this happen just on its own, with GWT occasionally wanting you to reverify, even if nothing has changed. The html file was there, so I just hit reverify and everything was fine.