IE 6.0 mangling AdWords links

[Tonearm]

I recently added a query string to my AdWords landing pages like so:

www.example.com/page.html?tracker=1

and ever since I have been seeing 404s from people with either of these user agents:

compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;1813
compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1

I checked the apache2 logs and the requests causing the 404s are coming in like this:

www.example.com/page.html%3Ftracker%3D1

Has anyone else had trouble like this?

[Rehan]

Yeah, I get plenty of those. But they never load the rest of the files associated with the 404 page like a normal user would, so that suggests to me that they're just scripts (and probably from 3rd parties).

[Tonearm]

Scripts hitting my AdWords ads? The only place this link exists is in my AdWords ads and and the 404s started popping up right away after I added the query string. Is this click fraud?

[Receptional Andy]

The first UA looks like the AVG toolbar [webmasterworld.com]. Rehan checked that it doesn't cause a chargeable click in the thread AVG's LinkScanner [webmasterworld.com].

[Rehan]

Good eye, Andy. It looks like the Firefox version of the AVG toolbar does generate those 404's when it checks landing pages, but the IE version of it does not.

[Tonearm]

How do you guys handle this with regards to your reports? Ignore it? Redirect malformed URLs to proper ones?

[smallcompany]

Just so we all get and stay connected:

[webmasterworld.com...]