There has been a reported glitch in Google’s new site map statistics program. Apparently, some were able to exploit a header in a 404 page to gain verification and thus view site statistics for competitors’ and strangers’ sites. This was reported here by David Naylor and he attaches a screen shot to demonstrate his success.

For those who missed the announcement, Google recently made the sitemap statistics a free service available to the masses. It appears that a small glitch allowed external users to actually view your statistics. I might add that the glitch results apparently from your server being misconfigured to return a 200 OK header for 404 pages that should show not found in the header. This is a known condition to Google according to a post dated September 7th, 2005. Did Google update that post and not redate it, or has there been no desire up until now to take out that problem?

This article was posted on Monday, November 21st, 2005 at 5:09 pm