How to verify Marketo landing pages for YouTube annotations

[Anonymous]

I'm trying to get annotations from my company's YouTube channel to link to our Marketo landing pages (pages.company.com), but I'm having trouble verifying our ownership of those pages to YouTube.  I believe the source of my troubles is that I can't verify ownership of pages.company.com, because that URL redirects to our fallback page (www.company.com).

Here are the different verification methods (Choose a verification method - Search Console Help​)

• Add a meta-tag to homepage.  I can't edit/add anything to pages.company.com, it redirects to www.company.com
• Upload an html file.  The HTML file needs to be uploaded to pages.company.com; again, that page does not exist, I can only upload to pages.company.com/rs/xxx-xxx-xxx/images
• Verify via Google Analytics tracking code.  We have the asynchronous tracking code set up correctly, but again, not on pages.company.com where I believe YouTube is looking for it
• Verify via domain name provider.  I don't think this is an option for Marketo landing pages.

Has anyone successfully linked/verified their Marketo landing pages to YouTube?  How did you do it?

Thanks.

[Josh_Hill13]

I was under the impression that the page HTML verification would be pages.company.com/URL_OF PAGE.html which youtube might provide.

Did you try creating a page and then adding that HTML to the page? I believe that should work.

[SanfordWhiteman]

No reason domain name provider wouldn't also work for Marketo LPs, because you are using pages.company.com and you control company.com's DNS.

[Josh_Hill13]

you'd have to ask IT to do this for you unless you happened to have access to the DNS records.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yep, but I think that may be the move here -- the other verification methods indeed do not like it when the root redirects.

[Anonymous]

** As Sanford Whiteman​ points out below this reply, if you have access to your DNS Zone you can add a temporary CNAME in order to verify the domain.

Reference: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Domain verification using CNAME records​

However, if you do not have direct access to your DNS Zone (and do not want to involve another department, or wait for the changes to propogate), the method below works just as well.

If you have yet to add the Marketo Instance URL to search console, do so.

1. Initiate the verification process and select the "HTML file upload" method (Alternate Methods tab).
2. Download the .html file.
3. Go into Marketo > Design Studio > Images & Files > Upload the .html file
4. Once uploaded, copy the full url for the .html files location.  (Design studio > Left Sidebar >  Highlight "Images & Files" which will show the file listing on the right side.  Sort the "Last Updated" column by descending order, and the .html file should show up within the first result. Right click on the file, choose "view", and then copy the full url that is within your address bar.. keep this handy for the next step.)
5. Go into Admin > Landing Pages
6. From the top of the Admin screen select New > New Redirect Rule.
7. Select your lp url for the first "Original URL" dropdown, and for the 2nd field next to it, paste in the file name that you had previously uploaded into Marketo.  This should not be the full url, but rather everything after the url.
   Example:

   google783827364736846585.html

8. Now you will need to copy the full .html url that you saved in step 5, and paste it into the "Redirect URL field".
9. Click create
10. Now you should be able to go back into webmaster tools, and successfully verify the domain.

[SanfordWhiteman]

The Rules of DNS prevent both records from being used at the same time. When you add a CNAME to the DNS, no other data can be present (thus a TXT for verification would be ignored).

The Webmaster Tools CNAME verification (not TXT verification) gives you a unique hostname <unique-code-1>.<Marketo LP domain> for which you create a CNAME pointing to <unique-code-2>.dv.googlehosted.com

If you have access to your DNS zone this method works fine.

[Karen_Black]

Using Matthew's scenario - it worked like a charm!!!!!  THANK YOU so much!