Google AdWords querystring problem

Google AdWords appends the following querystring to a target url: ?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1BxGGGL_nlNLxxx&q=search-phrase&gclid=CMa5rsabablkjlj

This results in a 404 page, either when I have search friendly urls turned on or not. Modx uses "q=alias" as a querystring variable to set a page alias. Google Adwords uses "q=search-phrase" for setting a search phrase in an URL. In order to overcome this problem, I have replaced all occurences of [’q’] with [’p’] in "index.php", "index-ajax.php" and "/manager/includes/document.parser.class.inc.php)" to have another querystring variable for setting aliases in Modx.

In .htaccess I replaced:


with:


For me, this is now working. Google AdWords visitors now land on the correct pages. I don’t have snippets or modules installed that interfere with this. I guess, I don’t need to expect problems, because snippets, plugins and modules will use a document specific variable to request page alias info?

Interesting, looks like we need to make the GET parameter name configurable. And, as discussed before, add an .htaccess generator to automatically write the .htaccess rules or at least provide them to the admin to paste into their .htaccess file. This would allow deployments to work in more situations where potential conflicts like this might arise.

Wow. Boy, if this means what I think it means, I wish I would have known this about $100 ago. :’(

Mintsucker, do you have
"Destination URL Auto-tagging
Automatically tag my ad destination URLs with additional information useful in analytics reports." on?

Just did some tests and I can’t see where &q=search-phrase gets added. I can get gclid= easy enough, but in short I don’t get 404s when I send AdWords traffic to a MODx site using standard settings. There must be some option that you’ve enabled - if we could find out what that is, we can better warn people about this issue, or possibly find a way to correct this at the Google level.

I looked over traffic stats in AWstats for the site that I had used AdWords, but it looks okay. I’m not seeing where any 404’s came up and looks like the traffic went to the pages... they were only linked to through AdWords and not indexed by the SEs, so looks like my situation was okay.

Quote from: PaulGregory at Dec 11, 2006, 07:21 PM

Mintsucker, do you have
"Destination URL Auto-tagging
Automatically tag my ad destination URLs with additional information useful in analytics reports." on?

Yes, I have Destination URL Auto-tagging turned on. I have Google Analytics and Google AdWords on a different google accounts and I use a client center to manage my accounts. But, I can’t find any settings to have this querystring appended to my urls.

Will setting $q = $_SERVER[’REQUEST_URI’] help?

$_SERVER[’REQUEST_URI’] is quite useful because it store the original request URL instead of the redirected URL.

Mintsucker: The only place I could find where &q= could possibly be set was in the individual links themselves. It seems it is possible to specify a unique URL for each keyword. Possibly the client centre is adding these? If you could look at them in Google AdWords itself to see if the URLs have &q= in them I would be most grateful as we could have a more definite idea of the circumstances in which the workaround is needed.

Incidentally, many thanks for bringing up the issue, and for providing a workaround.

I thought for a minute there may actually be another way around this at the MODx level; in some languages a querystring &q=one&q=two results in a q with the value of "one, two", and I couldn’t remember how PHP handles it. But it seems that http://modxcms.com/blog.html?q=donate is the equivalent of donate.html - ie the second q overwrites the first.

Quote from: Mintsucker at Dec 11, 2006, 05:02 AM

I guess, I don’t need to expect problems, because snippets, plugins and modules will use a document specific variable to request page alias info?

Yes, but they may use p= for their own purposes (pagination?), which would then clash with your ’p’ - so watch out for that.

I just asked (emailed) Google.nl about the querystring. Normally, they respond within 24h, they say. The last time I emailed them, I got an answer after 14 days with a question to resend my email. >:( I hope they will do better, this time.