When I signed up with AdSense, I have read the TOS and say that it is forbidden. However, when I placed those ads to SSI files, I forgot that my 404 error pages have such server sides includes too. Therefore, I was ingorant and placed allegedly Google ads onto error pages as well as the rest of the website. I was curious why my traffic from Google got twice less than two months before. I checked everything, but only this morning I figured out that most likely I was because of that bad "luck". Can anyone confirm my concerns?
Placing adsense on 404 pages would not have affected your natural positioning in google, either way just remove it from your error pages.
It is; Although it would seam stupid to ban you over a small thing like that, you might just get a warning. But remove it anyway.
What if you are displaying the homepage anytime the URL does not exist? Would that go against the TOS?
Displaying your homepage is not an error page, its a default page that the error produces and wouldn't get you penalised. Putting it on a 404 error page is against the TOS.
i had this happen on accident... google emailed me and was very polite. I fixed the problem... no issues