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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T10:39:18+00:00

I received strange broken link report: Subject: Broken link on googleads.g.doubleclick.net Referrer: (url on

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I received strange broken link report:

Subject: Broken link on googleads.g.doubleclick.net

Referrer: (url on **my** site!)
Requested URL: /pagead/ads?(...)
User agent: (...)
IP address: (some foreign country)

So I took a look at CommonMiddleware, responsible for sending those reports.
It goes like this (Django 1.1 license apply here ;)):

    if response.status_code == 404:
        if settings.SEND_BROKEN_LINK_EMAILS:
            # If the referrer was from an internal link or a non-search-engine site,
            # send a note to the managers.
            domain = request.get_host()
            referer = request.META.get('HTTP_REFERER', None)
            is_internal = _is_internal_request(domain, referer)
            path = request.get_full_path()
            if referer and not _is_ignorable_404(path) and (is_internal or '?' not in referer):
                ua = request.META.get('HTTP_USER_AGENT', '<none>')
                ip = request.META.get('REMOTE_ADDR', '<none>')
                mail_managers("Broken %slink on %s" % ((is_internal and 'INTERNAL ' or ''), domain),
                    "Referrer: %s\nRequested URL: %s\nUser agent: %s\nIP address: %s\n" \
                              % (referer, request.get_full_path(), ua, ip))

The code is so simple that it’s quite obvious that in the email I received Referrer is swapped with host and request URL. I’m not sure what it means – if it was some hack trial, some bug in Django or maybe some bug in my code (FYI: Django hasn’t been patched and other broken link emails are correct).

Do you have any idea what could be wrong here?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    it’s not swapped. the referrer is your site, because there are hits onto your site, like http://www.reddit.com/domain/googleads.g.doubleclick.net

    everything is fine with the report, maybe you just got confused because the url it tries to hit looks like an external domain. here are some threads on the subject, actually you are not the only one who got hit with such links (google “googleads.g.doubleclick.net” got over half mil results, most with strange errors on websites)

    if i’m wrong, provide maybe some more details on the urls, but i think everything is fine here.

    http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hlrm=pl&answer=55581
    http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Analytics/thread?tid=200cb2d4021f93ce&hl=en

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