errory trying to verify google sitemaps

O

ovsoft

Verified User
Joined
Oct 27, 2004
Messages
68
We've detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a status of 200 (OK) in the header.
This configuration presents a security risk for site verification and therefore, we can't verify your site. If your web server is configured to return a status of 200 in the header of 404 pages, and we enabled you to verify your site with this configuration, others would be able to take advantage of this and verify your site as well. This would allow others to see your site statistics. To ensure that no one can take advantage of this configuration to view statistics to sites they don't own, we only verify sites that return a status of 404 in the header of 404 pages.

Please modify your web server configuration to return a status of 404 in the header of 404 pages. Note that we do a HEAD request (and not a GET request) when we check for this. Once your web server is configured correctly, try to verify the site again. If your web server is configured this way and you receive this error, click Check Status again and we'll recheck your configuration.

How can I fix?
 
Hello,

Do you have a 404.shtml file in your public_html directory?

You can test out what they're referring to by manually testing it, eg, I did it with our site
Code: 
[root@server]# [b]telnet directadmin.com 80[/b]
Trying 66.51.122.131...
Connected to directadmin.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
[b]HEAD /asdfghijklmnop HTTP/1.1
Host: directadmin.com[/b]

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
...
So you can do that with your own server to see what you get. (We *are* using a 404.shtml file).

John
 
Here is my test:

Code: 
telnet [url]www.ovsoft.com[/url] 80
Trying 209.135.157.200...
Connected to vs800.rosehosting.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
head /oijj HTTP/1.1
Host: ovsoft.com

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 12:45:39 GMT
Server: IIS 7.0.4-alpha4 on StrongARM x86 128bit
Content-Length: 325
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>403 Forbidden</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Forbidden</h1>
<p>You don't have permission to access /oijj
on this server.</p>
<p>Additionally, a 404 Not Found
error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.</p>
</body></html>
Connection closed by foreign host.
 
Hello,

Have you fixed the forbidden issue? (generally when public_html isn't 755).. When I tested it
Code: 
[root@server]# telnet ovsoft.com 80
Trying 209.135.157.200...
Connected to ovsoft.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD /asdf HTTP/1.1
Host: ovsoft.com

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 23:00:08 GMT
Server: IIS 7.0.4-alpha4 on StrongARM x86 128bit
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 9844
Content-Type: text/html
I got a 404 message... try and use HEAD instead of head.
 
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