Verify Your Home Business Web Site with Google

Do you have Web site for your home based business? If you do and it has any kind of original content on it, you may want to protect your content by getting your site verified by Google.

How and why should you do this?

Spam sites can be set up to hijack content dynamically from your website creating a site that looks exactly like yours. This has actually been a problem for some time -- it's called proxy server hijacking. Google (and the other search engines) sometimes have trouble telling the spam site from the original. If the search engine decides your site is the copy and not the original, your site may get removed from their index. Not good!

This is where Google's verification service comes in. Google has a service called "Webmaster Central" where you have access to various webmaster tools.

One of them is the verification process that can show Google who actually owns the site. You must have a Google account do this. It's not terribly complicated, but you must have access to your site's HTML or CSS. Google Webmaster tools will give you the code but you must place the file they give you. That's how Google will know the site belongs to you.

So while you may not be able to explicitly stop content hijackers, you can certainly show them who's boss! Once your site is verified with Google, duplicate content elsewhere that was stolen from your site will be treated as such. So take this small step to protect your home based business site (with Google at least).