Verify Your Joomla Site with Google Search Console

Google Search Console shows which searches bring you visitors, which pages Google has indexed and which ones are broken. Before it shows you anything, Google asks you to prove you own the site, usually with a verification meta tag in the <head> of your homepage. Pasting it into your template's index.php works until the next template update wipes it and Google drops your verification. You can add the Google site verification meta tag to Joomla with one HTML snippet in Code Snippets, and it survives every template update.

Get your verification tag

You need a Google account. If you already added your site to Search Console, you can open the verification screen again at any time.

1. Go to Google Search Console and sign in.
2. Click Add property and choose URL prefix.
3. Enter your full site address, including https://, and click Continue.
4. Under Other verification methods, expand HTML tag.
5. Copy the meta tag.

The snippet code

Your tag looks like this, with your own token in place of the x's:

<meta name="google-site-verification" content="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" />

Paste the tag exactly as Google gives it. In the Site Header location it lands in the <head> of every page. Google only checks your homepage, but keeping it everywhere costs nothing.

The same snippet can hold other verification tags, like Bing Webmaster Tools (msvalidate.01), Pinterest (p:domain_verify) or Yandex (yandex-verification). Put each one on its own line.

How to add this snippet

1. Install Code Snippets if it isn't installed already.
2. Log into your Joomla backend.
3. Go to Components → Tassos Code Snippets.
4. Click New.
5. Enter a title, for example Google site verification.
6. Set Code Type to HTML.
7. Set Insertion Method to Auto-Insert Locations.
8. Set Location to Site Header.
9. Paste your verification tag into the editor.
10. Click Save & Close.

Check that it works

1. Open your homepage and view the page source.
2. Search for google-site-verification.
3. Go back to Search Console and click Verify.

Google should confirm that you own the site. If it doesn't, check that the snippet is published, that the token matches exactly, and that you added the same address your site uses, with or without www.

To keep pages like your thank you page out of Google, see Add Noindex to Specific Pages in Joomla. To learn more about how HTML snippets work, read the HTML snippet docs.