Google AdSense and "Unacceptable site content"

Last week, out of some curiosity and to intention to explore the features of Google AdSense, I decide to apply for the Google AdSense account.  Though my personal site, the one you are looking at right now, is definitely not one of the heavy user base site, but I still get around 2,000 unique visitors and 4-5 thousands page views per month. I have been blogging and updating the site for more than 2 years now, and I thought this is a decent figure and track record, and I should get the Google AdSense account with out any issue.

So, last week I applied for the account at Google AdSense, and though the partial review was done and approved within 2-3 hours (which I suspect is automated and done by some machine), the final manual approval took almost a week and then I got that all the famous “Unacceptable site content”  disapproval email from Google AdSense. The details of the issue in the email from the Google was:

Unacceptable site content: Your website contains content that we do not
allow at this time. Please review our policies
(https://support.google.com/adsense/bin/topic.py?topic=1271507) for a
complete list of site content not allowed on webpages.

Well, that was nice shock. Looking at my site pages, I don’t see any illegal content, plus almost all of the content is my hand written, so there should not be any copyright issues as well. Kind of confused and bit embarrassed, I started searching web for the issue details and workarounds. And that’s when I found that “Unacceptable site content” issue doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a problem with site content, but there could be many other factors. Here are some which I found relevant in my case, and the remedies, I applied:

Issue: For some Asian countries (China, India, Pakistan, etc), you site must be older than 6 months before you can apply for Google AdSense.
My Solution: As my site is already more than 2 years old, so this was not an issue in my case.

Issue: You should have a Policy page on your site clearly declaring the Advertising Partners details (DoubleClick DART Cookie for Google), and stating that your respect visitors privacy and will not share their details with others.
My Solution: I don’t had this page, but it was quick to create and post using the following auto policy generator and then tweaking it for my personal website:
http://www.serprank.com/privacy-policy-generator/

Issue: The other factor which can harm your approval is the duplicate content.
My Solution: Well, in my case though almost all the content on my website is my personal, but I do used to blog on WordPress for 1-2 years in the past. When I migrated my site to this new server, I copied that content to this new site, but kept the old WordPress site running as well. I think this was harming my new site reputation, as its content was almost 30% match with old WordPress account. So to fix the issue, I simply went to my WordPress blog account, and set its privacy setting to not visible to the public. This way I do have a copy of my content on WordPress, but it’s not visible to search bots and other people.

Issue: The last important issue is that your site must have good content and traffic which is of attraction to the Advertisers.
My Solution:  Although, as I said above, my website had good average visitors (around 2-3 thousands per month), but during evaluation period, I decided to place the test Ads on the home page, and one of the blog page only (which are not visible until your Account is approved). This was a mistake, as these pages have relatively very low user hits, and thus in 4-5 days of evaluation period,  these pages got only few dozens of hits.  I think this provided the wrong statistics to the personal reviewing the site for final approval, and they rejected it. To fix the problem, I re-applied for Google AdSense, and then placed Ads on the pages which have high hit rate on my site (USB Disk Manager and Dynamic Subtitle Translator).

With all these solutions and fixes in place, I re-applied for the Google AdSense account, and this time I got approval in less than 48 hours. Yeah!

So far everything seems to be working fine. The earnings are very low (according to my expectation though), but earning money from the site was never the idea or intention. I just wanted to explore and try the Google AdSense and see how it works and get integrated with Google Analytics.

I hope you find all these info helpful. Please note that I’m just not an expert Google AdSense user, i fact only a newbie in this field. I can’t help you with any of your problems getting Google AdSense approval (check the Google Forums for this), but hopefully some of solution/fixes list above might be relevant to you, and help you correct these issues easily.

Tags: Google, Google AdSense, Issue

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2012 at 5:10 am and is filed under Google Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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