Can I place adsense for search units on a 404 not found page? Can I place adsense text ad units on that same 404 not found page? This is a group of questions that comes up a great deal. There are also a lot of mixed answers out there.

If you have a plain, uncustomized 404 page, with no content, you can not use either of these. It is against their terms of service. However, if your 404 has a little bit of “we’re sorry, blah blah…” content, and perhaps a few other helpful content items, then you can safely place the adsense units on it.

Hi [protected],

Thanks for your email. I apologize for the confusion and will be more than happy to clarify.

After looking up ticket #[protected], I noticed that your questions were about placing Google ads on customized error pages that contain sufficient text-based content. For this type of pages, you’re welcome to place Google ads on them, as our crawlers will be able to serve relevant ads.

However, regarding your question in ticket #[protected], it sounded like the 404 error pages you’ve mentioned were the default error pages with no content. According to our program policies (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies), no Google ad may be placed on any non-content-based pages.

Therefore, if you’re able to customize your error pages by adding enough content, you’re more than welcome to place Google ads on them.

I hope this information clarifies your concerns.

For additional questions, we encourage you to visit the AdSense Help Center ([]google.com/adsense_help), our complete resource center for all AdSense topics. Alternatively, feel free to post your question on the forum just for AdSense publishers: the AdSense Help Group ([]groups.google.com/group/adsense-help).

Sincerely,

Nicole
The Google AdSense Team

Hope this helps, and as always, before you believe what you read on the net (including this) be sure to have a good and clear understanding of the actual adsense program policies AND the terms of service AND the webmaster guidelines.