The gclid kills html pages?

404 error on the landing URL but Google shows all is OK

[pavlovapete]

By chance a staff member clicked on one of our ads and found that it led to our 404 page. It appears the appending of gclid made the page fall over. Previously I have not clicked on our ads but only viewed them through the Preview interface. I won't make that mistake again.

We do have a URL rewriting system in place and the html page is actually virtually served from the Joomla CMS. Maybe the gclid doesn't kill real physical html pages?

Anyways I just wanted to let you know that the Adwords interface had not picked up any problems. Landing page speed is good, etc. The link to the ad from within the interface does not have the gclid appended to it and so it worked without error. Maybe Google could consider appending a dummy gclid to the landing page URL from within the Adwords interface so that advertisers can see what is really happening? I've wasted company money on this error.

Cheers

[SanDiego Art]

This sounds more of a website re-write issue vs. a Google issue. Do you know if you server is returning the correct codes? I know you say it resulted in a 404 page being served but Google bot may have got another response from the server (when it last checked).

Do your pages break if there is anything after the "page.html"? ex. page.html?test=1

You can remove the gclid (I think!) if you disable the auto-tagging for Google Analytics.

[pavlovapete]

Thanks SanDiego Art,

I added the gclid to a real html page and it worked fine. So yes it appears to be an issue with my rewriting system.

Cheers