Google Verification File problem

Can't verify the ownership

[MoveyourwebSEO]

I make use of statistics provided by google to many of my sites.. It shows sometimes really important info, like errors on crawling and so on. But! For some of the sites I can't verify my ownership - these sites have dynamically generated URLs but there I've implemented mod_rewrite and special google file (that is blank actually) shows in a browser. But while making a verification I keep getting an error: "NOT VERIFIED
We've detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a status of 200 (OK) in the header."

What should I do?

[encyclo]

You need to fix your error page that is served when there is no appropriate page relating to a particular URL - if the page is non-existent the server should return a "404 Not Found" HTTP header. As it is, your site responds with a "200 OK" which is the standard code for an existing page.

[arbitrary]

Yeah, like encyclo says.

I had the same thing going on. Try requesting that page in a header checker tool. You will see that the incorrect header response (200) is being sent.

I had this same problem and it was because I had incorrectly set up my error (404 not found) response.

[a1call]

Hi,
One way would be to temporarily rename your .htaccess to something else click on verify and once verified rename it back to .htaccess

[swones]

Google will periodically re-verify as far as I can tell, it seems to for sitemaps anyway. I made the special google file and got verified, I then deleted it and a few weeks later my sitemap came up as unverified again. I guess you need to leave it on the server permanently?

Simon.