Blogs Showing The WMX Verification File, Instead Of Main Page

This week, we have various Blogger blogs reported as displaying a mysterious WMX Verification File, when main page view would be expected.

This is the WMX verification file. If you are having problems with the WMX verification for your blog please visit http://help.blogger.com/bin/static.py?page=start.cs

This symptom was first observed Thursday, October 22, and Blogger Support is aware of the problem. Supposedly, the problem was fixed, though some blog owners are still reporting it.

We note that the Google Webmaster Central Blog: Verifying a Blogger blog in Webmaster Tools now instructs us to use the meta tag verification procedure.

The "Webmaster Tools" auto-verification link from the Blogger dashboard is no longer working and will soon be removed.

Is your blog showing this, in place of main page view? If you can provide some diagnostic details, you might help Blogger to help you and others. Precision here is good - and date, time, and timezone will be appreciated.

• What's the URL of the blog?
• When did you first observe the problem?
• When did you last publish a post to the blog?
• When did you last modify the template?
• Did you add the blog to Google Webmaster Tools, using the dashboard wizard, or using the GWT native procedure?
• When did you add the blog to GWT?

(Update 10/23): Some bloggers are working around the problem by refreshing the blog. From Settings - Publishing,

• Change the name to any available URL, and Save.
• Change the name back to the correct URL, and Save.
• Note for a custom domain published blog, you'll have to publish back to BlogSpot, then back to the correct domain URL.

If you do this, you ought to examine the Google Webmaster Tools entry for the blog, and check your Following relationships carefully. Both GWT and Following are sensitive to blog renames.

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