Re: Error upon trying to submit a Google sitemap

At the moment your website redirects to a
'not found error' page that gives the HTTP response status
200 OK for a non-existent URL. It is OK for human users,
but robots cannot distiguish between URLs that exist on
your server and those that do not, so Googlebot cannot
know if your verification file exists or not on your server,
since all URLs give the same OK response.
If you can ask your web hosting company to
change this, at least while you verify and view stats,
such that a non-existent URL returns a 404 (not found) HTTP response.

magneto77 wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Upon reading more. I found that I need to do the following according to
> further reading available when I click on the above 404 sentence link.
>
> https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/verify.html#verificationfileconfigerror
>
> 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.
>
> Does this mean, I need to get the Web Hosting company to fixed the
> Server Configuration????
>
> The server type the website is operating is Microsoft-IIS/6.0.
>
> I would appreciate any guide on this issue.
>
> Cheers,
> MAG77