Webmaster Tools Verification Status and 404 Errors

[travelin cat]

Today one of my sites is showing up as not verified. The error message says:

"We've detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a status of 200 (Success) in the header."

I have changed nothing and doing a header check for a non existent page on my site gives a 404 error, not a 200.

Any ideas why this would happen? I can't use WMT until this is corrected...

[tedster]

Have you verified that the http header is actually 404 - and you're not just serving a page that says "404" in the text content? Just use any server header checker to see the actual http status code that your server is returning for non-existent urls.

Google has been doing this more and more to help websites avoid the kind of problems that come up with common errors - such as a 302 to a custom error page that then returns a 200 OK. That means every "bad" url ends up looking like a good url but with the custom content as duplicate for every bad url.

[travelin cat]

Ted, Thanks for the quick reply. I used the server header check found int WebmasterWorld control panel. I just tried it again and got this:

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:55:20 GMT

[travelin cat]

Apparently this is an issue with my CMS. Something may have been altered in the search engine friendly component.

Time to dig in...

[tedster]

One of the challenges with 404 errors can be that some kinds of errors are handled at the server level and other kinds of errors may be handled by, say, the database or the rewrite utility -- some other secondary technology.

I've worked with sites that gave a perfect 404 response on the IIS level, for instance, but the errors that were handled by the .NET platform generated a 302 redirect to a 200 OK url. So a typo in one part of the url got a 404, but a typo elsewhere got the problematic response. A parallel situation can be true on Apache.

[travelin cat]

Thanks again Ted.

[Badger37]

You can always validate your site by using the meta tag option...

[travelin cat]

As a follow up, some non-existent pages are throwing a 404 with the following data:

HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:05:36 GMT
Server:
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.3
Last-Modified: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 21:20:13 GMT
Content-Length: 6846
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

While other non-existent pages are showing a 200 with the following:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:05:21 GMT
Server:
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.3
Set-Cookie: 76074cec8f3f6bdf816d3f8e93317e0a=-; path=/
Set-Cookie: mosvisitor=1
Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 21:20:13 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate
Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

I'm stumped....

[phranque]

have you checked the http response status chain for the pages that return a 200?

[travelin cat]

Phranque,

Sorry. I'm not sure what you are referring to.

[phranque]

i usually use:
lwp-request -eSd 'http://example.com'
(which provides all http headers and the http response status chain but no content)

or firefox and the Live HTTP Headers [livehttpheaders.mozdev.org] plugin.