Obsolete Google Adsense links makes WordPress post go empty

Jul 25, 2008 by Aleksandar Vacić 1 minute read

In one of my posts here I had a referral link for Google Adsense. Recently, Google sent an email around that it will stop using them. I read that with half a mind and dismissed it.

However, this has one interesting consequence in WordPress - this link confuses the_content() API call and it returns empty string. I removed this Adsense link (broken into several lines for clarity):

<a title="Ads by Google" href="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/iclk?sa=l
&amp;num=0&amp;client=ca-ref-pub-1148791019820431
&amp;adurl=https://www.google.com/adsense/%3Fhl%3Den_US%26ai%3DBSsF-kUZjRc6ZFpWA-wK2rKTwCI2f8heZ0tCAAsWNtwEAEAEgyM
61BEDLFkicOVDBw_S-A2D8pvuN9CWgAZeVyP0DsgEFYXBsdXPIAQHaARBodHRwOi8vYXBsd
XM6ODEv4AECgAIBlQITul4KqAMD
&amp;ai=BwfOLkUZjRc6ZFpWA-wK2rKTwCI2f8heZ0tCAAsWNtwEAEAEgyM61BEDLFkicOVDD64L
CAmD8pvuN9CWgAZeVyP0DsgEFYXBsdXPIAQHaARBodHRwO
i8vYXBsdXM6ODEv4AECgAIBlQITul4KqAMD">Adsense</a>

and things were back in normal. No idea what is exact problem, just posting for the sake of others having the same problem. Thank you goes to commenter David that alerted me to this.