Industry observers witnessed various lawsuits against Google over the past few years, as litigants made accusations over issues like click fraud and their rankings in the search results.

A recent lawsuit noted by InformationWeek finds Hal K. Levitte suing over his AdWords campaign, which ran in the summer of 2007. Ads that appeared on parked domains and on error pages generated some clicks, but no conversions.

“Levitte spent $136.11 for ads on parked domains and error pages, which works out to 15.3% of his $887.67 ad campaign,” the report said.

Once news of this legal kerfuffle emerged, industry observers weighed in with less than favorable commentary about Levitte’s action.

“So a man got 668 clicks on his ads through one portion of his Google AdWords, and zero conversions,” Andrew Goodman said. “And for that, it’s seen as good enough reason for a lawsuit. Ever heard of testing?”

“Although there is fraud on domain parking, this appears to be another manufactured lawsuit to milk Google for money,” Domain Name Wire said. “Only $136 worth of ads on parked domains is hardly a fair sample size. Perhaps he was advertising for a highly competitive topic with known high click prices.”

Legal keywords like ‘mesothelioma lawyer’ tend to merit substantially higher prices than most biddable possibilities. It seems highly unlikely a court will judge for this plaintiff for failing to be competitive in the market, but sometimes judges make odd decisions. We expect Google to do the usual ‘defend vigorously’ thing in the case.

Other people run into that frustration, and according to monitoring site Pingdom, they are hitting it a lot in the top 100 websites as ranked by Alexa traffic.

“Curious about how the big players on the web were handling this, we tested the 404 error pages for all the top 100 websites in the US and found that almost one in four had an inadequate 404 error page. Sinners include Google, Match.com, YouTube, Blogger, Megaupload and many more,” Pingdom noted in their post.

Webmasters can do a better job with their 404 pages. Instead of just bringing the visit to an abrupt end, like Match.com does with a blank page, the 404 offers an opportunity to provide the visitor with a reason to stay on the site and look around rather than hitting the Back button automatically.

Pingdom particularly liked what Weather.com does with its 404 results. Weather.com identifies itself, has links to its other services, and provides a search option to find weather forecasts. It’s much better than another 404 laggard, Google, which tosses out branded page not found error 404s.

follow me on Twitter