Hello,

I cannot remember when or were I read this, but someone blogged something like: 'top ten adsense mistakes'.. well anywho, one of the points they made was placing adsense on 404s, logins and those type of pages... leading to accounts getting deleted because of it.

Has this happened to anyone before? or is the guy just being sama: ?

I read the opposite (somewhere can't remember) that someone boosted their profit considerably placing adsense on 404 pages. Theye ven showed where they asked adsense about it and got an email back saying it was fine.

Imagine asking a clerk in a computer store for some specific hardware. He doesnt help you, yet starts telling you about various offers in the store, contests and so on, ignoring you in the same time... Putting ads on a 404 page is the same thing...

I could imagine that would be pretty profitable. I have never tryed it myself though.

Putting on the white default 404 page is probably questionable, but if you have a custom page that matches your site then I don't see why it should be a problem.

what I know is that you shouldn't put your ads on page without content.

Read the TOS, or simply send an email to adsense team. I wouldn't risk my account for that.

On my 404 pages, I put affiliate programs.

From the way I understand it you can only have Adsense on a content page and I'm not sure if a 404 error page would be considered a content page. Best bet would be to email Google.

Putting adsense on 404's is new.. ahehehe, time to email them Google!

What sort of ads would be served though? Since there's no content, there's nothing for Google to contextually match against - or is Google clever enough to match them to the rest of your site?

Putting adsense ads on redirect/404 pages is breach of tos and will get you banned.

Originally Posted by kazue

Putting adsense ads on redirect/404 pages is breach of tos and will get you banned.

Yeah I concur with this.

What might be acceptable though is something like the following - on one of my sites I modified the CMS so that if there is a 404, the CMS will try and find related articles. So its like "Sorry couldn't find that - would you be interested in this instead?" then some links to other articles. Its HTTP200 so technically its not a 404, it has high paying keywords based on the article titles etc, and hopefully it ends up getting indexed too.

If you are showing adverts on a HTTP404 page, I'd be fairly worried that google might spider it and see the 404 and adsense etc. Not sure what other advertisers say about this though.