But at first they’ve got rejected again. I was persistent this time. I’ve changed the secure split testing URLs to non-secure identical ones and, what do you know, this time they were accepted.

So 2 conclusions:

1. Stuffed Tracker split testing URLs work in Overute (yay!).

2. As I understand the problem was very specific to the SSL certificate that we use on our own secure site. It is not pre-installed in Internet Explorer prior to version 5.5.

In our own Stuffed Tracker I can see the test click that someone from Overture editorial staff has made (or this could have been a robot as well) and they use a browser that identifies itself as:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0) RPT-HTTPClient/0.3-3E

This looks more like a robot.

So again, problem solved. Or rather there was no problem in the first place. Sorry for misleading information.

Thanks for the suggestion. Stuffed Tracker already uses the standard “Location:” method when it performs split tests. And include the page idea seems to be incovenient, since then the page will be served with the tracker’s URL in the browser’s location field, which is misleading for the visitor and probably is not what you want anyway.

To be honest, this blog entry was written in frustration because of the different limitations that I’ve encountered when starting to advertise via PPC. I’ve never really studied the real reasons why Overture declined my listings with a split testing URL. I just thought that the problem might appear because of a redirect used in the split test.

Now, that you’ve showed your concern about this as our potential customer I will get to the bottom of this. I am currently waiting for Overture editorial team to review my new target URLs again pointing to a split test.

I’ll post here what I will find out.

header(‘Location: pageA.htm’);

or

include ‘pageA.htm’;

This is not Stuffed Tracker specific. Overture just don’t seem to like a redirect target URL. Any other split testing software should have the same problem with them.

We are currently investigating any possible solutions to this problem.

Thanks.

Sorry, I really don’t know how this will influence your page rank. I recommend asking about this at http://www.webmasterworld.com forums. You can find some real experts there, including Google’s employees.