Google adsense bot broken?

verbatim

Has anyone else noticed that the google adsense bot stopped working a few hours ago? It requests incorrect urls on dynamic sites. This is a major issue for people with adsense ads on their websites. I contacted google about it but obviously the more complaints the better, and also its a Friday evening.

From my blog:

From last night any page that google adsense bot (Mediapartner) requested from my site resulted in a 404. This not only affected this site, but another site I admin which is in a different country, running different software and operating system.

For example the adsense bot requests:
http://bigulo.com/index.php%3Fnamesearch=george+bush
http://www.politics.ie/viewforum.php%3Ff%3D2

When it should be:
http://bigulo.com/index.php?namesearch=george+bush
http://www.politics.ie/viewforum.php?f=2

The reason for this is it converts all question marks in a url to %3F. This only affects the google adsense bot, all other user agents work perfectly and the google search engine bot works fine.
At first the incorrect urls were appearing intermittently first appearing at [30/Nov/2006:20:42:23 -0600] with correct urls appearing inbetween. Then at [01/Dec/2006:05:58:03 -0600] all further urls from the adsense bot were incorrect, and have been ever since.

Since the adsense bot cannot view any pages, it cannot serve out context related ads, so public service ads are appearing, resulting in lost revenue. Judging by the times, I would say they tested a new version of the adsense bot, then deployed it across all of their adsense bot machines at 12pm GMT. If you run adsense on your site, I'd suggest checking your logs and contacting google.

mneylon

I may get round to checking my logs later, but any sites I run adsense on seem to be working fine

verbatim

blacknight wrote:

I may get round to checking my logs later, but any sites I run adsense on seem to be working fine

The problem is that adsense isnt indexing any new pages or content whilst this problem exists, so its working off information it gathered before this broken bot was put to work. The two sites I mentioned are very dynamic in nature, so its had an immediate and dramatic impact on the ads that are shown (or not shown as is the case).

UPDATE: They seem to have fixed it now.