AdSense On 404 Pages, Is It Allowed ?
Many Internet marketers tries to find new ways and places to put their AdSense ads.
One very unique place for AdSense ads that increase in last few weeks is place AdSense ad on 404 error pages.
First lets start by explaining what is a 404 page ?
A 404 page is page that shows up when a visitor tries to reach a page that does not exist on the server.
There is a general 404 page that defined by your hosting server, but in most hosting plans you can define a custom 404 page.
This can be done through you htaccess file or thorough the control panel of you host.
It’s very common to put on a custom 404 page filled with useful links that will help the visitor to find the information that he was looking for.
But as I started in the beginning some Internet marketers put AdSense ads on their 404 page.
In general it’s a very good idea, because your visitor does not have many options where to click and he will probably click on you AdSense ads which will make you some income.
In general this page have a higher CTR potential more than any other page on website .
But on the other hand this may contain non-relevant ads, and you visitor will not find any interest in clicking them.
The big question is it allowed ? Is it allowed to put AdSense ads on a 404 error page ?
The short answer is it’s depends on you 404 error page.
Previous versions of Google TOS had a specific sentence that forbid AdSense on 404 error pages, in the beginning of 2007 Google has changed their TOS and removed this sentence.
So if you want to see the world in black or white colors, you can put AdSense on 404 error pages.
But if we are reading the new Google AdSense TOS we can a sentence that can forbid us to put AdSense on an error page:
“… No Google ad may be placed on any non-content-based pages.”
So at the end it’s depend on your 404 page. if you have information related to your site on your 404 page you can put AdSense on that page.
If you are using a general 404 pages that does contain any information then putting AdSense on that page in forbidden.
Though it might be dubious whether to put adsense ads on 404 pages or not, but we can surely put adsense for search on 404 pages. I even wrote a small guide on how to do it here:
http://tech.shantanugoel.com/2008/11/06/make-money-out-of-nothing-add-google-adsense-for-search-to-your-404-page.html