I checked my “Bad Behavior” log and saw that “Bad Behavior” was reporting that it had blocked 74.125.75.17.  The reason given was “IP address found on http:BL blacklist”.  I determined that this IP address did belong to Google. I ran several more tests and each time the Google Analytics verifier used this IP address and was blocked.

I added the IP Address to my “Bad Behavior” white-list located in directory <blog>/wp-content/plugin/bad-behavior/bad-behavior/whitelist.inc.php and restarted my httpd service. This allowed me to verify Google Analytics.

I use several of Google’s service. This has me considering white-listing all of Google’s IP Addresses. Currently, this appears to be “74.125.0.0/16″ in CIDR format. However, at this time I decided not to do this. One of the main reasons is that would make me trust any computer that accesses the internet from inside of Google. I’m not sure that I’m ready to do this.

Below is my whitelist.inc.php code with the IP 74.125.75.17 white-listed.

<?php if (!defined('BB2_CORE')) die('I said no cheating!');
 
function bb2_whitelist($package)
{
	// DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!
 
	// Inappropriate whitelisting WILL expose you to spam, or cause Bad
	// Behavior to stop functioning entirely!  DO NOT WHITELIST unless you
	// are 100% CERTAIN that you should.
 
	// IP address ranges use the CIDR format.
 
	// Includes four examples of whitelisting by IP address and netblock.
	$bb2_whitelist_ip_ranges = array(
		"64.191.203.34",	// Digg whitelisted as of 2.0.12
		"208.67.217.130",	// Digg whitelisted as of 2.0.12
		"10.0.0.0/8",
		"172.16.0.0/12",
		"192.168.0.0/16",
                "74.125.75.17",          // Google
                "65.54.233.0/24",       // Microsoft Live
//		"127.0.0.1",
	);
 
	// DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!
 
	// Inappropriate whitelisting WILL expose you to spam, or cause Bad
	// Behavior to stop functioning entirely!  DO NOT WHITELIST unless you
	// are 100% CERTAIN that you should.
 
	// You should not whitelist search engines by user agent. Use the IP
	// netblock for the search engine instead. See http://whois.arin.net/
	// to locate the netblocks for an IP.
 
	// User agents are matched by exact match only.
 
	// Includes one example of whitelisting by user agent.
	// All are commented out.
	$bb2_whitelist_user_agents = array(
	//	"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) It's me, let me in",
	);
 
	// DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!
 
	// Do not edit below this line
 
	if (!empty($bb2_whitelist_ip_ranges)) {
		foreach ($bb2_whitelist_ip_ranges as $range) {
			if (match_cidr($package['ip'], $range)) return true;
		}
	}
	if (!empty($bb2_whitelist_user_agents)) {
		foreach ($bb2_whitelist_user_agents as $user_agent) {
			if (!strcmp($package['headers_mixed']['User-Agent'], $user_agent)) return true;
		}
	}
	return false;
}
 
?>

• This first way, involves placing an HTML file on your site using an Google generated HTML file name.
  This must be placed in the root directory of you site.
• The 2^nd way involves placing a Google generated meta tag in your site’s default webpage.

Based upon my previous experience with SharePoint, I tried the HTML file first. Using Internet Services Manager I determined the physical directory that was mapped to the virtual directory for my SharePoint site. Next, I created an HTML file in that directory using the name that Google provided and “viola”, I figured that I was done. Unfortunately, the way SharePoint sites are registered into IIS, a SharePoint site would not render my HTML file from this location. This results in a 404 error. On to the meta tag option.

My 1^st attempt at the meta tag option was to create a hidden “Content Editor Webpart” on my site’s home page and place the meta code in it. I suspected that this would not work as the meta tag needs to go into the head section of the HTML page before the body section. Sure enough, it did not work.

My next approach was to determine which file that I could modify to place my meta tag in.
I’m sure that there is a SharePoint Designer way to do this. However, if you are using the free version of SharePoint 2007, then I figure you may not want to buy SharePoint Designer.

SharePoint sites open with a default.aspx file that is based on the site type. There is are seperate default.aspx for Team Sites, Blog Sites, etc. Each of these default.aspx files include a default.master. The default master can be overridden on a site by site basis by editing the default.master in your site’s “Master Page Gallery” by accessing “Site Actions” –> “Site Settings” and then selecting the “Master Pages” Link in the “Galleries” section. Rather than change the default.aspx which would affect all sites of a type running on my server, I decided to change the default master for my site.

To change the default.master, you will:

• check it out.
• download a copy
• edit it with notepad (or some other text editor) and place your meta tag
  I chose to place my Google meta tag just below the
  <META HTTP-EQUIV=”Expires” content=”0″>
• upload the update
• check-in the file

You can verify that this is correct by visiting your site’s homepage and then viewing the page source via your Web Browser. If you can see your verify code, you are ready to verify your site with Google and move to publishing your sitemap.

Getting my sitemap into google
In order to get Google to download my sitemap, the sitemap file, sitemap.xml in my case, would need to be anonymously accessible form a url on your site that Google lets you specify. I already knew that I could not simply place the sitemap file into the root directory of my website. My solution was to create a SharePoint document library in my site, provide anonymous read access and upload the sitemap.xml file to that library.
Then I entered the sitemap url into Google.

My reservations with the existing plugins had to do with modifying code in the theme. Although, I’m more than capable to modify the theme, I did not want to remember to do so every time I changed or upgraded my theme.

When you setup Google “AdSense for Search” on a plain old website, you:

• create a search results page that contains the “Search Results Code” JavaScript that is generated by Google.
• create a search button on the pages of your website, using some more Google generated JavaScript code.
  This is done by placing the “Search Box Code” JavaScript that is generated by Google on the pages of your website where you want the search button to appear.

Much to my surprise, this turned out to have a fairly direct translation to wordpress. It seemed pretty simple to do.

First, I setup my Google “AdSense for Search” which created 2 JavaScript code blocks: “Search Box Code” and “Search Results Code”

Next, I created a search results page for my site. Making sure that my permalink was in the format of http://mysite/search and then in source view I added  the Google generated JavaScript code for the “Search Results Code” from my “AdSense for Search”. This will look something like:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--mce:0--></script>
<script src="http://www.google.com/afsonline/show_afs_search.js" type="text/javascript"><!--mce:1--></script>

Last, I removed the standard wordpress “Search” widget. I created a new Text widget and placed the Google generated javascript “Search Box Code” from my “AdSense for Search” into the text of the new widget. This will look something like:

<form id="cse-search-box" action="http://mysite/search/">
<div>
<input name="cx" type="hidden" value="partner-pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:yyyyyyyyy" />
<input name="cof" type="hidden" value="FORID:10" />
<input name="ie" type="hidden" value="ISO-8859-1" />
<input name="q" size="32" type="text" />
<input name="sa" type="submit" value="Search" /></div>
</form>
 
<script src="http://www.google.com/coop/cse/brand?form=cse-search-box&amp;lang=en" type="text/javascript"><!--mce:2--></script>

Then I made my new search widget which was named “Text” the first listed widget.

This seems to work pretty well.

Maybe in a future release wordpress will let me give user controlled names to my text widgets. I currently have 3 widgets named Text