After upgrading to 4.x (not sure when it happened on the path from 3.2 to 4.2rc2) a number started showing up at the end of our permalink URLs. Like this one:

That "#001034" is the problem. It seems to serve no purpose but when you navigate to the page with it on the URL then all we get are PSAs from Google, etc. If we take the number off then we get paying ads.

Please anyone, where is it coming from and how can we get rid of it?

Thanks Very much.

I would check you archive paths, and your template code, the #number is probably the entry id from the database.

I seriously doubt that a simple anchor on your URL is causing Google to completely ignore the content of your page and fall back to PSAs. (Not that it shouldn't be removed, but you're making a really strange inference here.) On the other hand, that page is throwing Javascript errors directly related to your ad code on every single page load.

Solution of sorts:

Have to give this anecdotally as the underlying issues are not clear. I had a whole description of what we found and what we think might have fixed it but going back over it all I can only give you apparent symptoms.

1. The problem number is gone.
2. It turns out that the problem number in the permalink URLs was the trackback ID #, padded out with zeros. Found this while examining the database (via phpMyAdmin) to try to find differences between the blogs.
3. Previous "All pages" republishing has not changed the URLs but one attempt this morning did, and the numbers went away with that even.
4. Internally in the database there are still many entry records with the old, incorrect URL in the trackback_URL field.

Hope this might be helpful to somebody.

Thanks to ONM and Su for replies. Your kindness and time are very much appreciated. Thanks.

Su: I agree that this tag value should have made no difference re: pulling ads and it may have been some other coincidence occurring but the appearance was this: that when we navigated in the same browser from the same IP to a URL without the tag appended then we got a meaningful ad but when we went to the same URL with the number tag appended to it, then we got PSAs or nothing.
Go figure.

Thanks again.

Sorry to bump, but has anyone found a straightforward solution to this issue? I've turned trackbacks off, and my entry publishing path is blog/%y/%m/%-f .

But for some reason, my entries publish as /blog/2008/07/basename.php#000777, where the number is the entry id padded with zeroes. Argh!

What is your preferred archive type?

It's set as entry. At the moment, that's the only archive type I have.