404 Pages and Adsense is totally ok!

specifically disallowed you should have some kind of data on your page

 

This question is too old i know,but to i not start the same again,what is new with 404 page and adsense? Please fresh news,latest.

 

too be honest, some people have no common sense. having unsolved 404 pages would imply to google that you have
a low quality site, simply because traffic will not stay on 404 page all that long, then bounce off just as quick; I would
think people have some common sense, and redirect 404 pages to pages that maybe relevant, then you may have
a good chance of reducing your bounce rate, and thus increase your serps in the engines....

or maybe increase your 404 pages, higher bounce rates, and lower rankings...
(is this the quality that google is really looking for?)

 

Awesome! I had no idea this was okay. I was always under the impression it was not okay. Now I can get to work on my website!

 

Hello

I found what Google write about 404 pages https://prnt.sc/fx2ats then this is a prove that 404 pages are not good for Adsense.Then people do not put adsense on 404 pages!

 

I usually dont give out advice on here for Adsense but in this case I will tell you how I work with Adsense and 404 pages. To clarify though, I haven't read the whole thread, just the latest page. So my answer is to the question, how do you handle 404 pages and Adsense? I also assume you are using Apache as your web server.

First off, 404 pages negatively affect the most important part of your Adsense site, your visitors. Without visitors, it would be hard to generate revenue (Duh, right?). The default 404 pages are usually plain white pages that simply tell your visitors the page they are looking for cannot be found. From there more than likely that visitor will leave and may never come back. So I highly recommend having a custom 404 page. To find out how to direct visitors to a custom 404 error page:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-a-custom-404-page-in-apache

On this custom 404 page you should politely tell the visitor that the page they are looking for cannot be found and you should apologize for the inconvenience. From there you should offer options to help the visitor find what they are looking for. For example if I had a cake making website I would have an unordered list to common pages on my site such as:

- If you need to know what ingredients you need, click here.
- If you need to know the best brands to use, click here.
- If you need help with our site, please contact us here.

I also use the Google Custom Search module that you can generate through the Adsense interface. This allows your visitor to search your site only and show the results on your website. You can also potentially make money off of this as well with the ads being displayed on your search results page. For more information on how to set this up, go here:

https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/160530

With regards to Adsense, never put Adsense ads on a 404 page. Reading their documentation, it appears its against their policies. Below is the policy I'm referring to:

According to the Google AdSense Program Policies, "No Google ad may be placed on any non-content-based pages"

Since error pages usually contain no content (just an error message, plus maybe links back into the site), a regular error page almost certainly would not qualify for AdSense ads. I personally wouldn't take the risk, its not worth it.

Now that we have our custom 404 page, the next step is to find any pages giving you a 404 error on your site and resolve them with a 301 redirect to a working page on your site. A 301 redirect tells search engines that the 404 error page has permanently moved to a new page. For more information on how to create a 301 redirect through your htaccess file:

http://www.apache.com/how-to-redirect-pages-using-a-301-redirect-and-the-htaccess-file/

If anyone uses PHP and wants to know how to do a 301 redirect via PHP:

https://www.phpjunkyard.com/tutorials/php-redirect.php

By setting up these 301 redirects, your visitors wont see the custom 404 pages anymore for that specific page, plus if there is any SEO juice/rankings from the old page, some of that juice can transfer over to the new page. And of course it looks good to search engines when you dont have a bunch of 404 error pages.

So, how do I check for 404 error pages?

I use the tool, Google Webmaster. This tool is very valuable in helping maintain your site. If you aren't using it now, I highly recommend you start ASAP! This is a free tool that can really improve your site and increase your SEO. Google Webmaster will show you any pages giving a 404 error for each site you have setup in your webmaster account. Every day I log in and check for these 404 error pages, find the proper page I want to redirect it to, and using htaccess, I setup a 301 redirect to redirect that 404 page to the new working page. It takes me maybe 10-15 minutes tops to do all my sites each day. And while you are in there, I recommend reading up on Google Webmaster, it offers a lot of other useful tools, such as the ability to submit your xml sitemap.

We rely on search engines to scan our site and to find and index all the pages on our site. But search engines dont always find all of your pages. To make sure all of your pages are found and indexed by the Google search engine, you can create a xml sitemap file and submit it via the Google Webmaster tool for each of your sites. Within 24/48 hours Google should then process the xml sitemap.

The Google Webmaster tool offers even more tools to help improve your sites SEO. For example there is a section that shows any duplicate content found for each site. If you know SEO, you know duplicate content can hurt your rankings. The tool also provides pages that have too long or too short meta titles and or meta descriptions. I recommend if any pages are found to have duplicate content or have too long or too short meta data, then to research and fix these pages.

Another thing to mention, if you dont have a mobile version of your site, this is something you should really look into. A lot of traffic is starting to come from mobile devices, such as smart phones. These days its not all that hard to take an existing non-mobile site and have it work for mobile devices, without starting from scratch. Media queries via CSS now allow for responsive layouts. So you can have your layout adjust based on the current screen size via CSS. I personally use Bootstrap now for all my new projects.

So to recap:

- Create a custom 404 page
- Use Google Custom Search module on your custom 404 page to help visitors search for the right page and make a little money as well
- If you haven't yet, sign up and setup Google Webmaster for all your sites
- Go into Google Webmaster each day and find any 404 error pages and make 301 redirects to the new page, this will help with your sites SEO
- Browse Google Webmaster to see all the other cool free tools they offer that can help your site get more traffic and rank higher in search engines

You may have noticed I used SEO a lot in my post. If you dont know what it means, its an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization.

Also, I didn't cover this above, but Bing also has their own Webmaster tool that I recommend to use as well.

https://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

Recommended Tools:
- Google Webmaster
- Bing Webmaster
- Google Analytics
- Google Keyword Tool

And as always, content is KING!