What do you do with you 404 page ?

[temi]

I was just wondering if webmasters have are doing creative things with their error 404 page, I know Duke want to place adsense on it but what are other webmasters doing with theirs. Ideally you should actually aim not to have 404 but when its inevitable what did you do?

[Paul_KY]

I make mine a home page duplicate.

[crowebird]

iv made mine a home page duplicate before, mine now usually is tell you that you have reached the bad page link and what to do about it.

[pinyo]

Mine just link to the site map. I know there are some fancy 404 page out there but I rather spend my time somewhere else.

I think putting AdSense on 404 is against their TOS.

[temi]

Mine just link to the site map. I know there are some fancy 404 page out there but I rather spend my time somewhere else.

I think putting AdSense on 404 is against their TOS.

Duke was going to do that too but he decided again it for the same reason

[seb_]

I make mine a home page duplicate.

wouldnt it confuse the user if they went to the homepage after clicking a link that they htought was going to send them elsewhere? or do you display a message aswell to tell them the page doesnt exist?

[Paul_KY]

Seb,

My site's links work perfectly. The only reason a visitor would get the 404 page is if they typed in a page, which did not exist. For instance, www.paulscoolsite.com/reallycool.html may be a link, which is legit, but if the user types in www.paulscoolsite.com/reallyKOOL.html then that would take them to my home page, and hopefully they'd stop goofing around with typing in urls and just click the links.

Hope that helps.

[seb_]

Ah of course....

[Duke]

Duke was going to do that too but he decided again it for the same reason

Ya you guys pretty much talked me out of it. Anyway, I can't imagine the ads that google will place on error pages for relavence.

I haven't customized my pages yet but will likely make it obvious that it is an error page and link to all of my sites on it.

I wonder, is there a script that will remember where you wanted to go and will let you proceed in that direction? I'm thinking there must be something out there.