Precondition Failed

Thanks for letting me know. I must’ve been using an older version of BB. I installed the newest one & activated it.

I’m still getting the same 412 error at Google’s Remove URL site but I suppose it may be possible that my host server hasn’t updated itself, a cacheing problem somewhere along the line, or some other reason. I’ll wait till tomorrow morning & see if it corrects itself by then.

Do you add IPs to the BB whitelist via the whitelist.php file within the BB folder? If so, do you add IPs in this section of the file?

$wp_bb_whitelist_ip_ranges = array(
// "10.0.0.0/8",
// "172.16.0.0/12",
// "192.168.0.0/16",
// "127.0.0.1",

Yes, that’s were you add the IPs to the whitelist. And, be sure to remove the two backslashes ( // ) before the line that you want to use.

I just did a little more digging at the Google site & may’ve located my problem & perhaps it’s not related to BB after all.

I see under “remove a dead link” at https://www.google.com/webmasters/remove.html#outdated

the following:

Note: We’ll accept your removal request only if the page returns a true 404 error via the http headers. Please ensure that you return a true 404 error even if you choose to display a more user-friendly body of the HTML page for your visitors. It won’t help to return a page that says “File Not Found” if the http headers still return a status code of 200, or normal.

When someone comes to my server using the old link, I’ve configured things so that they see a 404 template within my theme folder. Will this satisfy Google or not?

If it should, then I’m back to square one…

No, I have had experience with this before, it is Bad Behavior causing the error when using Google’s automated URL removing tool. Check Bad Behavior’s log if you don’t believe me. But, even if you added it to your whitelist, Google would still deny your request because the link would then return a 403 (rather than a 404).

On a side note, why is your server configured to return a 403 msg. when people use links from your old blog? A 403 msg = “Access Denied”. I think that a 404 (“Not Found”) would be much more appropriate.

You’re right macmanx…I misspoke (& reedited that post accordingly). I’m using a 404.php msg. located within my theme folder.

Thanks for pointing me back to BB as the culprit. I’ve posted at BB’s comment thread & hope Michael may have some ideas.

His response will be that you need to add either the IP or user-agent for Google’s automated URL removing tool to Bad Behavior’s whitelist.

I did add my IP to BB’s whitelist file & as you said, it worked. Michael did say that everything related to Google should be “internally whitelisted” & 412 errors aren’t supposed to happen. But I guess there’s something not working quite the way it should somewhere (don’t know if it’s Google or BB). Maybe Google Remove URL works differently than other Google services/features that might interact w. BB?

If you can copy the entries in your Bad Behavior log that are related to blocking the Google URL removal tool and submit them to Michael, he may be able to look into them and find out what caused the initial problem.

Indeed.

Michael asked me to search those logs. I’m pretty new to phpmyadmin & once I open it I can’t figure out how to find the BB log. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I found the BB logs in phpmyadmin.

Now, I’m trying to find the logs for the specific attempts which generated a 412 error. I’ve searched for my own IP & I don’t see any hits in which there is a denied reason. Then I tried searching using the Google URL for the Google Remove URL feature ( https://services.google.com:8882/urlconsole/controller )& couldn’t find anything that looked like that in the log. I guess the next thing I’ll try is looking through every attempt which generated a denial.

Are there any other search criteria I should try?

Try searching for just “google”.

Thanks for the suggestion.

I’m having a bit of trouble figuring out how to do this search. Within the BB log, I’ve clicked on ‘Search.’ But I can’t figure out into which field I enter ‘Google.’ The fields I’ve tried give me an error so I know I’m doing something wrong. Should I try ‘Browse’ instead? Or something else?

Login to phpmyadmin, go to your WordPress database, hit the “Search” tab, enter “google” into the “Word(s) or value(s) to search for (wildcard: ‘%’)” field, highlight your Bad Behavior log table in the “Inside table(s):” field, and hit “Go”.

Thanks for those directions. That helped. But I got 5,000 instances of the term ‘Google’ so that prob isn’t going to narrow things down much. I also tried services.google.com as that’s the URL for the Google Remove URL feature but that came up empty handed.

Starting to feel like a needle in a haystack. I’ll prob. give up for now & come at it once more if the problem arises again. But thanks again for sticking w. me & trying to help.