unable to verify my site

i have been able to verify all my site's.. except for one.. it says its returning a 404 error of 200..

anyone know how to fix this because my hosting company does not!

 

Are you meaning you just check to see if the site comes up?

If the site's main page not coming up, check into cpanel and see if the main page is still there and that it has the site page in it.

 

Did you save and upload an html file to your server that was given you by Google as a series of digits that appeared when you attempted to verify?

Looks something like: googlecf19ade3691ae2c4.html

~VegasMack

 

I think I saw this once and tried again an hour or so later and all was good.

 

I have only had that happen with Yahoo!

~VegasMack

 

The problem is likely that you are using a redirect page that actually redirects to a 'good' page. The 200 (Found) shows up from the good page and Google says no go...

Turn off your error pages and redirection, test with Google, and they'll likely let you in. Google will check this at random and turn you off again, but you'll know that this is it.

To permanently fix this you'll need a bit of http scripting to return a proper 404 while displaying the page. Does your site use PHP? I have a fix for you if it does.

 

look into http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/verify.html

 

Check the file name for a trailing space. Especially if you uploaded the file through an interface. If you copy the 19387318310231.html file name from googs page you will probably have a space after .html which may cause issues.

 

this is what is happenign and I need to know how to fix that


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.

 

The very first thing that comes to mind is having your server configured to send all 404 (and maybe other error pages) to your home page or some other redirect.

Also, if you have customer error pages built be sure that they present the correct header code. You can pretty them up all you want but they need to process as error pages.

What type of server? What type of site or CMS?

One other thing to do is do a search for a page header reader. Don't have a link handy. And try hitting a couple of your pages to see what headers are being sent.

I'd be willing to bet that the first item is the issue.

 

good advice. I will have to look into it..


Did anyone see the new ask commercial..

They claim there results are better then googles and that people only search google because its more popular!

ask is really giving it to google