I googled this Google login problem to no avail. Unbelievably unlucky I was—Looks like I was the only person having this problem??? (Pssst: or perhaps Google removed these from the search result?)

But anyway, it works fine now, and I’m a happy person again (hyperbolically speaking :D). Read more to see how I solved it.

The facts I gathered were:

• The problem was not browser-specific. It happened on both my Opera Mobile and Pocket/Mobile Internet Explorer
• The problem was not due to temporary internet files and cookies. I cleaned them up (sometimes this can solve corrupted cache and cookie date, but in this case it couldn’t).
• The problem was not due to the mobile device. I tried on Palm Treo 800w and HTC Touch Pro2, and both exhibited the same problem.
• This is more of a hunch than a fact: I think it had something to do with Google authentication page/mechanism.

And yes, my hunch proved to be correct. These are what I did to solve this issue:

First, I logged in to the desktop site on my mobile device. Note that this is not the same as changing your mobile browser’s rendering/display layout to mobile, meaning that I had to go to www.google.com on my mobile device (and I didn’t bother to change the browser’s rendering setting).

From there, I simply proceeded to log into my Google account. Scrolling, zooming, tapping the login button with my stylus, and finally it’s done. You won’t believe how slow and hard it was on my devices

And then, to verify it worked, I simply exited the browser and relaunched it to my iGoogle mobile site. And yes it worked! I even tried to restart my device, and yes it still worked. Hurrah!!!

So there you go. If you have the same problem, please try these couple steps. And let me know (ie. post a comment) if it works or not, will ya?

“Sure! What’s the problem?” I replied.

Client: “Can’t go to the website. Internet Explorer said something wrong with the connection.”

Me: “Other websites OK?”

Client: “Yep. Google, eBay, Facebook are all okay. Only 21watches.com webmail has problem.”

Hmm.. perhaps the webmail server is having problem, I thought. But to make sure: “So you can still go to 21watches.com?”

Client: “Yep, I can go ther—oh hold on… No man, it’s down too looks like. But yesterday was OK though.”

Good, so everything on that site was down… except that it’s NOT! I was on that website in that very second—using Firefox, in case the problem with my client was due to his IE misbehaving.

Me: “Perhaps your network guy did something bad? Like blocking your site by accident….”

Client: “No, he’s on vacation since last week. Yesterday no problem, and nobody else has access to the router. Heck, nobody here even KNOW what is a router.”

What a mystery… Anybody care to guess why?

So the following were the facts:

• Except 21watches.com, browsing other websites are OK. However, on my PC—and I also tested on my cellphone—21watches.com could load without any problem. This means it’s not website problem
• No network/router configuration changes were made. Assuming no hacker intrusion—and what hacker wants to block ONLY 21watches.com anyway?—and only 21watches.com was affected, this means it’s not network problem as well.
• There was no problem the day before, and no changes were made on the website/hosting side, so something happened between yesterday and today must have caused this problem.

My guess was that somehow their IP got blocked by the hosting company. Not by their DSL provider, because it wouldn’t make sense if they would only block 21watches.com. So off I went to test my theory: I remotely logged in to their router, used the router’s diagnostic tool to do a traceroute to 21watches.com, and—gotcha! The tracert stopped at silvercore1.whbdns.com (207.210.114.166), which is the ‘entry point’ to the web hosting provider.

Oh well.. off I went, making one call to Namecheap to unblock it. Courious, I asked the reason of the block, and it was because of 5 login failures to cPanel within 5 minutes. Oh boy

One more call to close this case: to the client. I told him that somebody in his company tried to login to the website’s cPanel unsuccessfully too many times, as well as the hosting’s policy of IP blockage due to this issue. “Next time, let me know if you guys forget the password; I can help reset it. Don’t guess too many times, or they will block you again,” I said.

“Don’t worry, it won’t happen again. And I’ll find out who did that this time for sure!” he said.

So the moral of the story is as always: Making one or two mistakes are understandable, but three is too many, and five I guess is too much. Especially if you’re on Namecheap (and I think other hosting providers must also have similar restrictions), they will block you if you make invalid cPanel logins 5 times in 5 minutes.

There, keep that in mind.

And good luck to that person who did it that time. May my client spare your life….

Questions? Problems? Leave a comment and I’ll try my best to help.

Anyway, I added the posts, created the pages, linked it to my Google Analytics account, and everything were checked. Monetization was also set up properly. And lastly: added it to my Google Webmaster Tools and tried to do verification via Analytic. Result? Big red fail:

What’s going on here??? Apparently lots of people are also in loss.

My Analytics account were good, and I could see the data from this new blogspot site coming in. Also to be able to link to my Analytics, Webmaster said:

… and both were fulfilled already. So the problem was neither on the Analytics site nor my blogspot site. Well Google, thanks for your simplistic and unhelpful error message

Anyway, the problem turned out to be due to the placement of my Analytics tracking code: I put the code before the closing BODY tag, where Webmaster expected it to be in the HEAD tag. So off I went: edit the HTML code of my blogspot template, move the tracking code to end of HEAD element, and tried verification again. It worked!!!

So as a summary, I just want to give this solution (fix) to the world:

Hope this helps!