Having trouble getting your site approved? Check it out

Getting your site approved for Google AdSense is a fairly straightforward process, but it has the potential to go south very quickly if you miss some of the basic checks.

If you are one of the site owners who have a hard time convincing Google that your site is legitimate and totally deserving of ads, you might want to check to see if your site meets the following criteria.

Google AdSense Site Ownership and Basic Checks

One of the most basic aspects of site approvals is proving to AdSense that you own 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 site ID either by adding the HTML provided by Google, verifying your ownership in Search Console, or adding your Ads.txt file.

Once done, you need to make sure that your site is accessible by AdSense. You can do this by first removing any IP address ranges or geo-restrictions, if applicable. Also make sure your site doesn’t have a password.

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

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

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
To prohibit : /

Quality content is necessary

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

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

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

Make sure your site is free from illegitimate traffic

Illegitimate traffic includes such things as auto-refresh, hidden ads, bots, crawlers pretending to be a legitimate user, clickjacking, adware, malware, cookie jam , browser pre-rendering, etc.

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

Make sure your site has an appropriate navigation system

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

You should also make sure that it has good readability, that it has functional drop-down menus and icons, and that the navigation elements direct all users to the correct content and not to missing or irrelevant pages.

Other recommended practices

Apart from all of the above, there are also several best practices that you should keep in mind while building your site in order for it to thrive.

You first need to make sure that your content provides a unique and engaging experience for visitors before you can start monetizing your site.

Crawlers are no longer dumb and you will have to focus on quality more than quantity – a site with fewer pages with HQ content will easily outperform a larger website with poor quality content.

Another benefit of this is that good content encourages visitors to spend more time on the site and keeps them coming back.

You should also make sure that your site has enough relevant content or articles for AdSense to understand what the site is all about.

Just filling the site with content and leaving it as an archive, however, won’t be very good. You should also make sure that the content is updated whenever needed and that new elements are added to keep the site up to date.

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

Once that’s all done, you’re pretty much good to go and ready to submit all of your pages to Google’s crawler. If done right, your site should never be rejected by Google AdSense again.

PiunikaWeb started out solely as an investigative tech journalism website with a primary focus on “breaking†or “exclusive†news. In no time at all, our stories were picked up by Forbes, Fox News, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, MacRumors and many more. Do you want to know more about us? Head here.