I submitted a total of 8 sites to Google sitemaps. If you’re familiar with Google sitemaps, it will require you to put a certain file on a certain location of your site to verify your ownership of the site. This is done for privacy reasons. In my case, Google asked me to put a file named ‘google0eb4543125f834aa.html‘ on all of my sites’ root web folder. I did so, and pressed the Verify button but I got an error telling me that the file can’t be found.
I tried and tried and tried but still to no avail. I slept for a while, and when I woke up, I gave it a try again but still to no avail. It was then that I decided to check my access logs in the hope to find out why Google can’t find the file.
When I checked my access logs, I realized that the problem was not on my end. It was Google’s :D. Instead of accessing ‘google0eb4543125f834aa.html’, it was looking for ‘googleeb4543125f834aa.html’ instead. See the subtle difference? No zero (’0′) after ‘google’. So I renamed all Google verification files to match what was on my access logs and retried the verification process! Like magic, it worked!!!
I know this is a Google bug and I know they will fix this if they were notified so I went to the Google Sitemaps discussion forum to post it but guess what, some other user alraedy found out about it and posted it there. The post is named “Error in Google Verification - Dropping leading zeros“. Nonetheless, I decided to add to the same post so as to confirm the bug. 
Now all my sites are verified! I know Google would have fixed this if I just waited but I just can’t wait…
Ciao!
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