Google Sitemap Verification 404-200 problem
Google Sitemap-Service makes it extremely difficult to check the verification.
There is a notorious error that cannot be easily fought:
NOT VERIFIED We've detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a status of 200 (OK) in the header.
The reason for this is, that google wants you to place a verification-file in the root-folder of your page. By checking the existance of this verification-file googles knows if you are the site-owner. Now google does not actually download this file, but just makes a HEAD-request to check if this file is actually there.
If your page now has some custom 404-page that returns the code of 200 instead of 404 the HEAD-check for the verification-file is absurd, cause every request to any file returns a 200-code, regardless if this file is there or not. So google demands that your 404-pages actually return the 404-code.
While this makes somehow sense, its not easy to administer, cause many dynamic pages do not have 404-pages any more, cause every url lead to a page.
google checks for a a file noexist_VERIFYCODE (same code as verifyfile) but does not identify itself as google when doing so!!
www.mydomain.at 64.233.172.37 - - [16/Mar/2006:12:45:42 +0100] "GET /noexist_xxxxxxxx.html HTTP/1.1" 200 73457 "-" "-"
1) verification of a static page
For the time of the verification-process I turned my page into a simple static homepage with only the verification-file. Every other page returned 404. I prooved this by using ‘wget -S’:
wget --spider http://www.adulteducation.at/googlef6xxxxxxxxxxx1.html .... HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: unspecified [text/html] 200 OK
wget --spider http://www.adulteducation.at/googlef6xxxxxxxx1_NOT_EXIST.html ... HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found 12:51:39 ERROR 404: Not Found.
\\ Nevertheless the goole-verify-process returned the above error:\\ \\ <code> NOT VERIFIED We've detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a status of 200 (OK) in the header.
2) verification of a dynamic page
After my try to fool google by providing a static-page during verification-process failed I changed my handler that creates the dynamic wegpage to return 404 on 404-pages on root-level (its not possible on sublevels, cause there are no 404-pages any more, cause every url is then interpreted partially as a seachterm that changes the result of the page, so there are no 404-pages any more).
I worked a while and then I’d made it:
wget -S http://www.adulteducation.at/googlef6xxxxxxxxxxxx1.html .... HTTP/1.1 200 OK
wget --spider http://www.adulteducation.at/googlef6xxxxxxxxxxx1_NOT_EXIST.html .... HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found 12:55:30 ERROR 404: Not Found.
I pressed verify again and got ... again ...
NOT VERIFIED We've detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a status of 200 (OK) in the header.
conclusio
I’m depressed and dont know what to do any more ...
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