Google AdSense: Having issues getting your site approved? Here's what to know

Getting your site approved for Google AdSense is a simple enough process but has the potential of going south real quick if you mess up some of the basic checks.

If you are one of the site owners having a really hard time convincing Google that your site is legitimate and totally deserving of ads, then you might want to check if your site satisfies the following criteria.

One of the most fundamental aspects of site approvals is proving to AdSense that you are the owner of the site. This is obviously for security reasons and because Google needs to make sure that they can communicate with the site.

You can do this by providing the ID for the site either by adding the HTML code given by Google, verifying your ownership in Search Console, or by adding your Ads.txt file.

Once that’s done, you need to ensure that your site is accessible by AdSense. For this, you may first want to remove all IP ranges or geography restrictions, if any. Also, make sure that your site is not passworded.

After ascertaining that your site is free from the above barriers, you can then proceed to add crawler access to your site. FYI, the crawler determines the content of the page so that ads can be provided accordingly.

You can grant crawler access from within your robots.txt file by removing the following lines:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: /

Still getting rejected? Well then, this time it could be the lack of content on your site that must be acting as a deterrent.

You see, for Google AdSense to approve your site, you need to make sure that AdSense at least has a bare minimum amount of content to generate relevant ads for.

Even if this bit is approved, you need to make sure you only place ads on pages with actual content.

Illegitimate traffic includes stuff like auto-refresh, hidden ads, bot, crawler masquerading as a legitimate user, clickjacking, adware, malware, cookie stuffing, browser pre-rendering, and the like.

Such invalid traffic and policy violations can ultimately even lead to account closure, so stay safe.

Last but not the least, you need to have a good navigational system in place. The basic checks for this include a proper alignment so that its elements line up well on all kinds of devices.

You also need to make sure that it has proper readability, has working drop-down menus and icons, and that the navigational elements are all directing users to the correct content and not into missing or irrelevant pages.

Apart from all of the above, there are also several recommended practices you need to keep in mind when building your site so that it thrives.

You must first ensure that your content provides a unique and worthwhile experience for visitors before you can begin monetizing your site.

Crawlers aren’t dumb anymore and you will need to focus on quality more than quantity – a site with fewer pages with HQ content will easily outperform a larger website with low-quality content.

Another benefit of this is that good content encourages visitors to spend more time on the site and provides an incentive for them to return.

You also need to ensure that your site has enough relevant content or articles so that AdSense can figure out what the site is all about.

Simply stuffing the site with content and leaving it like an archive isn’t going to be much good though. You also need to make sure that the content is updated whenever necessary and that new stuff is added to keep the site fresh.

Do note that repeating long sections of text, having multiple versions of the same article, or having too much content linked from other pages can affect the SEO ranking negatively.

Once all is done, you are pretty much good to go and are all ready to submit all your pages to the Google crawler. If done right, your site should never again get rejected by Google AdSense.

PiunikaWeb started purely as an investigative tech journalism website with a main focus on ‘breaking’ or ‘exclusive’ news. In no time, our stories got picked up by the likes of Forbes, Fox News, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, MacRumors, and many others. Want to know more about us? Head here.