Since the new Google Webmaster Tools interface came online recently we noticed that a new error started getting returned on a website – the rejection of a previously ‘validated’ website even though the HTML validation file was still in place. Our first avenue of investigation was to check that we were returning a correct 404 status header for an error page, and not a ‘200 OK’ message (since Google deems that to be spam – infinite pages). This didn’t throw up anything unusual so we had no reason to think that it was related to the rejected validation.

However, we eventually discovered the problem – although the site was returning a 404 status for all .php or extension-less URLs (folders) the .html extension was still returning a status 200 (the site doesn’t use .html but the Google Webmaster Tools validation file does). As the Webmaster Tools validation feature checks for both the presence of the Webmaster Tools HTML file (e.g. hghgjg576gjg.html) on the wesite root AND checks a random .html error to see the 404 response code this was why there was a temporary problem (it was seeing a 200 code).

Once corrected the site revalidated but I thought it was worth the post in case anybody else went around in the same circles as we did

Matt

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