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#904 – SH404SEF failing to redirect Google Adwords URL

Posted in ‘sh404SEF’

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Tuesday, 25 August 2015 15:09 UTC

jimhill10

Hi, we pay very large sums to Google Adwords to send us traffic to our landing pages. I noticed that recently the URL strings being sent are failing to load the pages with the string being added onto the end. Our 404 is revealing expensive redirects to our basic 404 page making the potential customer search for the landing page. Here is an example:

Desired Landing page: Plain landing page url without clickstring suffix...

URL sent by Adwords:

Adwords generated URL with & suffix string...

The portion ending with the "&" is not being removed.

There is no way to insert a custom URL because i never know the URL string.

Jim Hill

Tuesday, 25 August 2015 15:17 UTC

jimhill10

Here is some admin information. We were wondering why leads have been terribly slow the past two weeks. This would explain it. See the 404 errors for the Adwords landing URLs.

Admin url xxxx
User xxxx
Password: xxxx

Jim Hill

Tuesday, 25 August 2015 15:21 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

Can you please use the "code" button on the toolbar of this editor: I can't see the URLS involved.
Can you tell me how the orignial URLs are created and sent to Adwords?

The portion ending with the "&" is not being removed.

In such case, there should not be a &, there should be ? to separate the rest of the URL.

Rgds

Tuesday, 25 August 2015 15:34 UTC

jimhill10

Here is the Adwords URL showing up in the SH404 logs:

http://www.xxxx.com/Data-Capture-and-OCR/abbyy-flexicapture-document-capture-software&URL+Clickstring+0=C8BVIc0zcVaLLOoud3AGI_5ygCK2j1JkHtfiFz4YCrfuFzesBEAEgibfBKGDJrpmN7KSAEKABs_-3_gPIAQGoAwHIA4oEqgSYAU_QWze15mVgSpItvk48a_Gx-9A_vlA1VJCxPoW_Dw6GSHmnRNe4dkaD26OEwfniMoUHwLpIu7

I added the xxxx.com prefix of course.

Here is the plain landing page URL:

http://www.xxxx.com/Data-Capture-and-OCR/abbyy-flexicapture-document-capture-software

Thanks. Maybe Google changed something again! Jim

Jim Hill

Tuesday, 25 August 2015 15:43 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

Well, the problem is clearly that the URL is incorrect. It should have a "?" instead of a "&" to separate the query string from the main URL.

It's correct to declare it a 404, and as a matter of fact, Joomla SEF also declares it a 404.

I know it's not allwoed in theory, but may you want to click on one of your ads and see what happens, what's the URL actually created and arriving at your site.

Also review you adwords setup, I know there are some URL templates and things you can setup which might have a problem.

Lastly, actually, this doesn't look very much like an adwords URL, right? could it be that these URLs are simply unrelated?

Rgds

Tuesday, 25 August 2015 15:52 UTC

jimhill10

I see, could be these are coming from some of our other PPC ads. I will have to track it down, by thanks anyway. And I see that these are not correct Adwords URLs with the standard "?" suffix. It's working as intended, I'll dig in other areas. Thanks!

Jim Hill

Tuesday, 25 August 2015 15:56 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

404s can be anything, some bad links somewhere. If I go to your site and type yoursite.com/hello-how-are-you-today-jim in my browser address bar, you'll se that in your 404 URL list and may wonder where it's coming from.
Each case is different, the only important thing would be if those links where on your site (ie you have a 404 on your site somehwere).

Rgds

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