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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T19:32:59+00:00

Today I noticed that a few Google advertisements in an adsence block on one

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Today I noticed that a few Google advertisements in an adsence block on one of my pages were trying to display a file called “/pagead/badge/checkout_999999.gif” from my server. I did a bit of investigating and found out that the companies behind these adverts use Google Checkout and “checkout_999999.gif” is supposed to be a tiny shopping kart icon with a tooltip which reads “This site accepts Google Checkout”.

My problem is that “/pagead/badge/checkout_999999.gif” doesn’t exist on my server. What do you do to handle this on your website? e.g:

  1. Save the logo (alt text) on your server in the place it is expected by Google?
  2. Use a mod_rewrite rule to redirect the request? To where though?
  3. Find a adsense option to turn off Google checkout enabled adverts? (I looked but couldn’t see one?)
  4. Ignore the issue and get on with something important

Back-story – please ignore unless very bored: Page 2 of the search page on our site suddenly stopped working and I didn’t know why. It turned out to be related to Google adsense. We use PHP session variables to save search criteria over different pages which worked fine for a while but then randomly stopped working. Random bugs are the worst! I was trying to work out what else is random on the page and decided that the Google ads were the only other random thing. Sure enough, sometimes a particular advert seemed to clear the session variables and break the search. What was actually happening was that the advert was requesting a image from our server (“checkout_999999.gif“) which didn’t exist and Apache was behind-the-scenes redirecting to the site homepage which unfortunately clears the session variables needed for the search – hence the non-obvious breakage. I’m a bit worried that Google ads can request random files from my sever? I’d prefer if they could only use absolute URL’s if they want to include logo’s or other media.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    After playing around with Apache mod_rewrite for a while I have found a rule that seems to fix my Google Adsense issue:

    RewriteRule ^\/pagead\/badge\/checkout\_999999\.gif$ http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/badge/checkout_999999.gif [R=301,L]

    The problem is I’m not sure how to stop a similar thing happening in the future if Google decides to hotlink to a different file?

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