What happens when you get the "NOT VERIFIED - We've detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a status of 200 (OK) in the header." when you are trying to verify your Sitemap account? Read on...
Google Sitemaps
Google Sitemaps is a beta program from Google that allows webmasters and site owners to feed it pages they'd like to have included in Google's web index. Google's intention here is to help it better gather pages from websites based on feeds, especially of new or dynamically generated pages, that are supplied by the web owners themselves. These feeds can be configured to indicate the page's last modified date, how often pages change or should be revisited and a few other options.
You can create Sitemaps using Google's Sitemap Generator, which you must download and install in your server, or you may use any one of a number of web-based systems that's available on the internet.
Sign-in to Google Sitemaps to create an account and upload your site's sitemap.xml files here. The Sitemap account also permits site owners to view detailed statistics and other information about their site. The Site Verification procedures requires a few more steps and should not be much of a problem to webmasters.
"NOT VERIFIED"
SEOd scripts like ASM2, on occasion, may not be easily verified because of inclusions of Rewrite Rules or ErrorDocument declarations in the .htaccess file. When this happens Google Sitemap will return you the following message :
The query about this problem, posted on the in the Google groups - sitemaps board, brought us to this answer page at google.webweb.com. Two solutions was fowarded, one using the RewriteRule method and the other the ErrorDocument method.
We tested the RewriteRule method first and found it to work well with our ASM2 installations. We include it here for easier reference and access :
RewriteRule method
put this code in your main PHP index file (before any other PHP code) and change googleVerifyNumber to name received from Google
also you need to add this rule into your .htaccess (or virtual server configuration file):
