September 07, 2005
You want to
verify your site
so you can view additional statistics. You click the verify link beside the site on the My
Sitemaps page, create the file we ask for, upload it to your server, and click the Check Status
button. And then you see this error message:
We’ve detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a status of
200 (OK) in the header.
What should you do?
This error
means that we’ve detected that your server returns a status of OK when the requested file is not
found. This is the same status that the server returns when the file exists. When we look for
the verification file, we can’t tell if your server is returning a status of OK because it finds
the file, or because it can’t find the file. This means we are unable to verify your site.
Modify your web server configuration to return a status of 404 (file not found) in
the header of 404 pages. If your site is hosted, ask your hosting company to do this.
Make sure that if your server returns a custom error page when a requested file is not found,
that page returns a 404 status in the header. And make sure that the server doesn’t
redirect requests that return “file not found” to a valid page of your site, such as your home
page. This configuration returns a redirect status code (such as 301 o
302) rather than the correct 404 status code.
You can read more about
HTTP status codes.
If you don’t have a mechanism for checking the headers that your server returns, you can do a
search for terms such as
check server header tool
to find online tools that will check this for you.
Once your web server is configured correctly, try to verify your site again and we’ll check the
configuration.
Cómo lo aplicamos
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
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