Understanding 404 Not Found and Google Sitemaps Tools

Roger <crosseyedpenguin@xxxxxxx> · Sat, 30 Dec 2006 18:13:17 -0700

Hi,

My starting confusion is using the google sitemaps tool at 

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/verify?hl=en.

A complicating factor is that my ISP blocks port 80 and I am using URL 

forwarding to port 90 on my server.

I created a * googlea47802e0bbdc3e50.html*. file per the instructions 

and clicked the verify button.  Google found the file and then requested 

a non-existent page.  Per my access.log file this resulted in

  "GET /noexist_a47802e0bbdc3e50.html HTTP/1.1" 404 310 "-" 

"libwww-perl/5.803"

or what looks to be a 404 Not Found.

However, Google reports that:

  We've detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a 

status of 200 (Success) in the header. 

<http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35229&hl=en>

The explanation for the above says that while the page may say 404, the 

headers say 200, and therefore, the site can not be verified.

My own access of the page with Firefox 2 resulted in:
'''
Not Found

The requested URL / googlea47802e0bbdc3e50.html was not found on this 

server.

Apache/2.2.3 (Fedora) Server at xxxxxxx.org Port 90
'''

The Firefox Web Developer extension reports that the headers returned 

with the error page are:

'''
Response Headers - http://xxxxxxxxxxxx.org:90/%20googlea47802e0bbdc3e50.html

Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2006 00:48:35 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Fedora)
Content-Length: 309
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

404 Not Found
'''

The "404 Not Found" reported by Firefox seems suspicious in that it is 

not preceeded by a label and colon.  I have tried a few other web based 

tools (htmlhelp.com and seoconsultants.com)  to view header records and 

they agree with Google -- my response headers include a 200 OK response.

How do I start to figure out what the problem is?

Roger

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