Do you want to know why Google keeps rejecting your application for the Adsense program? It’s no secret that Adsense is one of the best (if not “the” best) contextual advertising network on the web.
They have the highest paying ads, the biggest inventory of advertisers, and the best quality ads. This is such an important thing. And, like all great things, it takes great responsibility to maintain it.
As part of this great responsibility, Google must establish strict rules and guidelines for publishers before they are accepted on the network. This is to ensure that only high-quality sites display Adsense ads. This, in turn, will keep advertisers happy, where all the money comes from.
That’s why over the years, as Google’s ad network has grown, it’s also becoming increasingly difficult to get accepted into it.
I know, it can be frustrating if you have tried multiple times and failed. But if you are not about to give up, here is a list of some of the reasons why Adsense applications are rejected and what to do about it.
Check it out, you might be doing a thing or two below that you didn’t get approved..
Why Google Adsense Not Approved
21. Your Website Is Too New
Below is an excerpt from an email sent by the Adsense review team to a website owner whose application was rejected:
Your domain must be registered and active for at least 6 months before signing up for AdSense.
Pretty straightforward and self-explanatory. If you are stuck here, you just have to wait. And while you’re at it, keep building your website too. Keep adding more amazing things that people want to see.
20. Not Enough Content
Content is the most important criteria Google considers when reviewing your site. That’s because, of course, your content is the reason people will visit your site. If you don’t have a lot of content, there is no reason for people to visit your site, so there is also no reason for Google to allow you to place ads on your site.
And when we talk about content, it is generally about text content. But videos, images, audio, or other things worth watching and spending time on also count as content on the site.
19. Low-quality Content
When we talk about content and Adsense, we are not talking about any type of content. We are talking about high-quality content. The kinds of things that really provide value, things that we can say are really worth spending time on.
You have to be very careful about the quality of the things you post on your website if you want to be approved in the Adsense program.
I know that “quality” and “what is worth spending time on” are very subjective terms. It depends on who is judging your content. But in general, the stupid and funny videos of some puppies doing nothing can be considered quality content because they provide something for the people who watch them – they make people feel good, happy and entertained.
Also, serious and important topics such as research or studies, news, references, etc. They are also considered quality content because they help people solve problems or find answers to their questions.
But articles copied and/or rotated from other sites are considered junk, especially by Google. They hate duplicate content and content obviously generated by stupid bots. You can never understand these things when you read them. Who would not hate these things?
In fact, Google works hard to remove sites with this type of content from its search results. So they really have no reason to accept these sites on their Adsense network.
18. Inappropriate Content
Some types of content, while adding value to some people, are simply not suitable for the general population. These things include, but are not limited to:
- Pornography/Adult materials
- Violent Stuff
- Hate Speech
- Excessive Profanity
- Hacking/Cracking Guides
- Illegal Drugs/Paraphernalia
- Sales of Beer/Hard Alcohol
- Sales of Endangered Species
- Sales of Weapons/Ammunition
- Sales/Distribution of Schoolwork
- Any Other Illegal Stuff
If you have a website or have pages about that content on your site, you can either give up on Adsense or give up on these types of content.
17. Your Site Is Infected With Malware
Some people do it on purpose – they distribute malware through their websites. But these people are mostly smart enough to know that they can’t get into the Adsense program, so they don’t try.
But most of the publishers or website owners who have malware on their sites don’t even know that they are infected. And, of course, to protect its name, Google cannot accept sites that spread malware on its network.
Malware, if you are not familiar with it, is a collective term for malicious software that maliciously steals confidential information from visitors or spreads viruses and all kinds of malicious material on the Internet.
To make sure this is not the reason your site is rejected, you can scan your site for services like Sucuri.
If you have discovered that your site contains malware, you will need to work to remove the harmful content from the site. And then, prevent future infections by improving your security. If you are using WordPress on your website, you can use the recommended security plugin included in this list of must-have WP plugins.
16. Not Enough Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is natural traffic: people who come to your site from other places on the Internet without directly influencing them. These are people who may have seen a link to your site in forums, your comments on other blogs, search results, etc.
This is traffic that does not come from paid advertising or other recommended promotions. If your site currently doesn’t have enough visitors to visit it regularly, it’s still not worth getting accepted into the Adsense program. This means that you have to create a bigger audience for it first, so it would be useless to show ads on it.
There is no shortcut you can take here. But one of the most effective ways to get a lot of organic traffic is SEO or search engine optimization. Optimizing your website pages to appear at the top of search results when people search for relevant keywords will significantly increase organic traffic.
Although this is not expressly written in their TOS, many blog owners claim in forums that traffic is important to get Adsense approval.
15. Low-quality Traffic
By signing up for Adsense, you cannot get traffic. You need quality traffic – People who visited your site because they have a genuine interest in your content.
The two most important indicators of the quality of the traffic you receive to your site are the bounce rate and the average time each visitor spends on the site.
If you don’t have organic traffic to your site yet and you want to cheat by generating cheap, low-quality traffic, such as traffic exchanges, pay-per-click sites, or Fiverr programs, you can expect to be rejected most of the time.
14. No Privacy Policy
Google is big on this privacy thing. That’s because people hate having their privacy invaded. And as a company that is always in the spotlight, processed from left to right, they would not want to partner with website owners who do not have a privacy policy.
Be sure to include a privacy policy page on your website and make sure your privacy policy meets the minimum required standards.
13. No Terms of Service
The Terms of Service of most sites always go hand in hand with their privacy policy. This is also an indication of the site’s dedication to complying with the law and following legal guidelines.
Having a TOS page on your website shows that you know the legal requirements that you must meet when running your website. This is the type of website owner Google wants to work with.
If you’re using WordPress, putting a standard TOS page and Google-compliant Privacy Policy on your site is pretty easy with WordPress plugins.
12. Bad Website Design
An ugly website is an indication of one or a combination of the following:
- Inexperienced website owner/editor
- Lack of attention to details.
- Spam / blackhat site
- Indifferent owner
And nobody who’s taking their business seriously will want to deal with people like these. Much less does Google.
So, if you want to increase your chances of being approved for the program, spend as much time as necessary on the design of your website or blog. Choose carefully a theme that looks nice and professional.
It doesn’t have to be expensive. You can even use free themes. No matter what platform you’re building your website on, there are always themes that look really great and professional, without being that complicated to install or use.
11. Not Using a Top-Level Domain
During the early days of the Adsense program, it was much easier to get approved. You can sign up for a website on a subdomain like example.blogspot.com or example.wordpress.com.
You can’t do that today. Google now requires new Adsense publishers to have their sites on their own top-level domains. (for example, example.com)
10. Ads From Other Networks
They don’t say in their guidelines that they won’t accept you if you already have ads from other networks on your site. But the Adsense approval team has strict and very relentless guidelines for not allowing publishers to show Adsense ads alongside similar ads from other networks.
They don’t want their ads to be confused with those from other networks or for ads from other networks to be confused with Adsense ads.
Therefore, to increase your chances of approval, remove your ads from other networks during the approval process. You can simply put them back in when you are fully approved. Just be careful not to violate any of the guidelines.
9. You Have Links From Bad Neighborhood
Google takes great care of its brand image and does not want to associate with publishers who are in bad companies.
The Internet is very similar to the real world. There are places where everything is organized, orderly and legal. Although there are also places where you will find all kinds of bad things, from immoralities to criminal things. Sites that have this type of content are considered a bad neighborhood online.
If you have links from those sites, it usually means that you are associated with them. And that association can easily get your Adsense application rejected.
But of course you don’t have complete control over who links to your site. Your competitors may even be doing negative SEO for you, creating malicious links to your site for Google to ban.
If you are unsure of the links to your website, you can access them using tools such as Ahrefs, OpensiteExplorer, or Majestic. Just a note: these tools will charge you if you want to access all the data they have collected about your site. But they offer a more up-to-date set of data.
A free alternative is the Google Webmaster Tools provided by Google. The only problem I noticed is that they don’t publish frequently updated data. You can wait a month (maybe?) Before you see who is linking to your site. And then when you visit these sites, they may no longer have links to your site.
And when you find out that you have links from, let’s say porn sites, you can also use google disavow tool.
It would be like telling Google to ignore these links to your website because it has nothing to do with those bad guys.
8. You Are Linking To Evil Sites
This is like the previous item above. Quite the opposite. And if you are the one connecting with the bad guys, it really means that you are really associated with them.
Fortunately, solving this problem is much easier than the other. Simply remove these malicious links from your website and the review team will no longer have reason to think that you are helping terrorists or drug dealers or any such person.
7. Server Downtime
This is usually a problem only with low-cost hosting services. If you host your website in a low-cost shared hosting environment, you are especially prone to it. But it’s not a big deal unless your host really sucks and your servers are shutting down every day.
Server downtime rarely happens, even in shared hosting services, but it does happen. And when that happens, all sites on that server will go offline.
If your site is on a server that one day stopped working for some reason and an Adsense reviewer reviewed your site at the same time, he won’t be able to see your site. Hence, reject your application.
Solution? Simple, just reapply.
And if you really want to make sure your site is live when the Adsense guys come to review your site, go ahead and transfer it to one of the most reliable (expensive) premium hosting services out there.
6. Unwanted Website Behavior
If you have scripts on your website that automatically open pop-ups and popunders or install things in users’ browsers during the visit, your rejection is guaranteed. And that’s totally reasonable. This type of behavior is annoying, and it’s not just Google that hates it. Everybody hates this.
So if you want to show Adsense ads, dominate your site and eliminate these annoying behaviors.
5. Your Website Is Difficult To Navigate
Finding important information on your website shouldn’t be that difficult. If a user wants to go to the main / home page of your website, they should be able to do so easily by clicking a visible button or link … rather than spending half an hour trying to find it.
Menus are standard components of all sites. They are used to facilitate user navigation. Make sure you have at least one on your website.
Using CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or blogging platforms like Blogger to build your website will make your job much easier. Especially when it comes to navigating the site for your users.
The menus for these platforms are readily available and created. They can even be created automatically as you add pages to your site. But of course, you should already know.
4. Your Site is Not COPPA Compliant
COPPA, if you’ve never heard of it, is the Children’s Internet Privacy Protection Act. It is a federal law in the United States that requires sites that collect information from children under the age of thirteen to comply with it.
Most websites, especially blogs, don’t have to worry about that. But if you have a website that collects personal information primarily from children (like a children’s social network, maybe?), You should include some special terms in your website’s Privacy Policy.
3. You’re Selling Counterfeit Goods
Imitation and other non-genuine products are always illegal, even if in some countries the implementation is not so rigid.
If you are offering these things on your website, it is better without Adsense. If you really want Adsense, be legit.
2. You Are Encouraging Users To Click On Your Ads
It is not legal to have text or graphics on your website that openly encourage or tell your users/visitors to click on the ads. Especially if you are offering rewards or something like that for them to do so.
This means that ad clicks are not due to visitors actually being interested in the ad offers. This will lead to a very low conversion rate for advertisers. It’s like fooling advertisers. And you don’t want people to do that to you.
Google doesn’t want to do that with its advertisers either, so it doesn’t accept publishers who mislead advertisers. If you want to join the Adsense network, don’t cheat.
1. You Have Previously Been Banned From Adsense
This can be difficult to get around. If you’ve ever been accepted into the show and got banned for violating any of the publisher’s terms, you’re supposed to be banned forever.
But one way around this is to register again using a completely different set of requirements: a different IP address, a different website, a different email, a different name, if possible (example: company name), etc.
Just make sure your new site meets all the other requirements and recommendations above.
And if you use a business name to re-register under a different name, make sure your business is real and has its own bank account. Because your earnings payments will be assigned to your company and you will not be able to cash the checks on your personal account.
If you still can’t get approved, even after following this long list of recommendations, keep in mind that some publishers even made several dozen attempts before they were finally approved.