adsense on error pages

Does google recognize an error page?

[eflouret]

Hello,

I've set up my homepage as the default 404 error page.

I've noticed in my logs that my homepage has far more views than the views shown at the adsense stats report.

So it seems to me that Google is recognizing when a page is shown as an error page and doesn't show ads.

But the fact is that if I deliberately type an error url, my homepage shows with adsesnse ads.

Then, why is this big difference between my log and the adsense stats? My log shows something like 2800 views and the adsense stats only 900. I have no problem with other pages of my site.

Thanks in advance,

Enrique

[ann]

That's pretty convoluted and could be viewed by Google as trying to "game" the system.

Think I would change it back to accepted practice very fast.

Ann

[jomaxx]

Since you've done the test and Google does indeed show ads, I would look elsewhere.

A big source of reporting discrepancies is spiders of various kinds hitting web pages, sometimes announcing themselves and sometimes more or less disguised as normal surfers.

P.S. I don't know if Google might consider this practice to be out of bounds, but IMO it's a nonstandard and confusing way of handling errors. It'll probably cause difficulty for you as well.

[eflouret]

Thanks for your replies.

I've been using my homepage as 404 error page for a long while but never noticed this behavior since I started using channels.

I've seen many sites using their homepage as the 404 default error page. Perhaps I should re-read the TOS.

I will change that. I'm in a close contact with google, I have all my major changes approved by them via mail.

Although this still doesn't explains the situation, the only thought of being doing something that could be thought as "fishy" makes me feel frightned.

Enrique

[jenkers]

reread the TOS. I'm pretty sure that it does state that you can't serve ads on an error page.

Your argument that it is a redirect to (or copy of or whatever) your homepage might not hold water with G as the page is generated by an error.

If you want the definitive answer - email adsense support and ask them if it is allowed to run adsense ads on a custom 404.

[jenkers]

as for the answer to your question - Jomaxx probably hit it on the head. If you have a number of bad links to / on your site then they may well be being followed by spiders - a close examination of the referrers for any 404's generated should tell you this.

[jenkers]

sorry for posting again - but for what its worth a more legitimate way might be to look through your logs to see which pages are generating the 404's and then reinstate / create those pages - or 301 them to relevant content pages - that way at least you are redirecting the visitor to a useful page.

[eflouret]

Thanks again for your replies.

I've just removed the htaccess directive and now my homepage is no longer the error page.

Anyway, I would like to state that, although a very lazy solution, I've seen that in my six years as a webmaster using the homepage as the error page has been widely used by other sites.

Perhaps I was more lazy than wise... Being 42 years old I should have used more of my experience rather than finding quick and dirty solutions... Lesson learned!

I've emailed google about this and will update this thread when I receive a reply. I'm pretty sure that the reason of extra pageviews is all about web bots. I never considered that bots could read 404 error pages. But it seems that they do.

Thanks again,

Enrique

[jomaxx]

BTW, you should definitely have a custom error page, but IMO it should be one that returns a 404 status code, identifies itself as an error page to the user, and does whatever it can to help them to the appropriate page.

Another thing I do is use the .htaccess file to intercept common 404's (e.g. from incorrect inbound links, which are surprisingly common) and redirect them to the proper page.

[eflouret]

Thanks jomaxx,

Yes, I have trapped lots of wrong and old urls via htaccess, but since I do a heavy use of ModRewrite, at some time I got tired of doing that and redirected all errors to the homepage.

I guess I will have to do a more exhaustive log research of error pages, and definetely create a good error page with no adsense there! (in fact I have no TOS against advertising myself in my own error page, I can do that! ;-)

Thanks

Enrique