acorath7

Also, it’s worth noting that the behavior described above won’t be apparent while you’re logged into wordpress, due to another condition for the same rule…

RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !^.*wordpress_logged_in_.*$

That little nugget had me scratching my head when Google was receiving 403’s and I wasn’t.

One of the configurations tends to block the AdWords bot.

Security > Tweaks > Filter Suspicious Query Strings

When enabled, a rule gets added to the htaccess file with a plethora of conditions. One in particular is problematic…

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^.*(\[|\]|\(|\)|<|>|ê|”|;|\?|\*|=$).* [NC,OR]

It’s common practice with AdWords to dynamically add the search term keywords as a parameter to the URL. The problem is that the Bot doesn’t use a keyword when checking to make sure that the URL is valid, so it ends up with something like this…

https://domain/path/to/page/?kw=

Because the kw parameter is left empty by the bot, the last part of the expression is met and the rule is fired….

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [F,L]

As a result, Google receives a 403 forbidden, and the campaign is turned off.