Why Was My AdSense Application Rejected?

There can be many reasons for having a rejected application - from incorrect personal data, or a typing error in your website address (url), to poor navigation on your website, or content that's not suitable for AdSense.

Application Details

The details you fill in on your AdSense application must be correct, and complete. Your name will be the name your payments go to if you are approved for an AdSense account, so you need to make sure this is correct in your initial application. The same thing goes for your address, and other personal details.

AdSense applicants must submit their website url when they complete an application. The website url is the part that looks like this: http://helpfulinformationfornewbies.blogspot.com/ or www.google.com .

Your website url must be correct because AdSense reviews your website to ensure it fits with AdSense policy, and contains the type of content their advertisers want to place ads on. If you type the url incorrectly, or if your website doesn't yet exist, then AdSense is likely to reject your application because they can't access your website.

Double check all the details in your application before you click the submit button. Once you send it, you can't edit it. You'll have to wait for them to review it (this can take anywhere from a few days to a few months) and send you an email. At that point, you can edit your application to correct any errors and resubmit it again.

To learn more about the AdSense application, visit their help center.


Website and Content Issues

When AdSense rejects an application, the email they send is usually pretty generic. It might say "wrong page type" without giving any further details, or it might list "poor or no navigation", or "under construction" or any one of a host of other reasons, most of which aren't very detailed.

The best place to get help in determining the actual issue(s) will be at the AdSense Help Forum. Volunteers and "Top Contributors" deal with questions like this every day, and most of them are pretty good at being able to tell you what the reasons will be, and can sometimes offer other suggestions to help you get your application and website "AdSense ready".

Page Type issues can mean anything from content that isn't acceptable to AdSense and doesn't comply with their policies, to not enough content.

In the forums we constantly see applicants whose blogs or websites have almost no content - one post or article is not "content". It's a beginning, but it's not enough to satisfy advertisers, so it's not enough to satisfy AdSense.

For some areas of the world, AdSense requires that a blog or website must be 6 months old - this actually means they want you to have six months worth of content. If you open a blog or website in January, make one post and wait six months you probably still won't get approved. The blog might be six months old, but there is still no content.

There's a saying over at AdSense... "Content is King".

Content must also be useful to people, and interesting. A blog full of posts that aren't going to interest people, or provide some useful information isn't likely to interest AdSense either. The sort of content that's going "out the door" (ie: getting less approval) at AdSense are sites that are built specifically to earn income with "get rich quick" schemes, or money making sites that have no purpose other than to accrue income from AdSense.

All content on your website or blog must adhere to AdSense policies. If it doesn't, you probably won't get an approved account. To see what the content policies are, you can visit the AdSense Program Policy page.

Poor navigation issues can be anything from having "flash only" navigation, to having no navigation, or to having navigation or menu buttons that don't link to any page, to broken menu links.

All flash navigation is difficult for the bots to follow, and if they can't follow a navigation link, to them, it's broken - they may be able to follow some of the links, or none of the links. On top of that, many people still don't allow flash in their browsers, so those people can't use your website. You need to create text links as well as flash links. You can put the text navigation in your website footer or sidebar, or create a sitemap with text links and link to the sitemap with a text link on your home page.

Menu buttons or links that are meant for future pages should either be removed, or should link to the page. Don't leave incomplete links in your navigation menu.

One of the biggest navigation problems we see are with blogs. Everyone thinks because it's a blog, it already has navigation. In some cases, this is true, it does have a form of navigation...but only if you have a bunch of posts. It's the posts and their pages that create navigation in the form of the archives on most blogs. If you have only one or two posts, you really don't have much in the way of navigation.

You'll notice in the sidebar of this blog, the first thing is titled "Pages". That was created using a blogger gadget, and the blogger pages function. You could also use the links gadget to create a menu. In the links gadget you can enter a url (in this case, the url of the page with the post on it) and a website title (instead of a website title, I use the post title) - everytime I make a new post, it is added manually to that menu. Anybody visiting my blog doesn't have to hunt through the archives looking for a subject they want. It's in the post menu. As a blog grows and has hundreds of posts, you won't want to use this method. You'll need to do something else, like only include important posts. You should always have an archive listing in your sidebar for navigation, and a text sitemap can be very useful as well.

Under Construction might seem like a pretty specific reason, but for many it is anything but. We see lots of people in the forum whose websites aren't under construction, but that's the reason they are given.

We see this a lot with websites that contain mostly graphics or images, and very little text. Landing pages or home pages that have an image and no text are another problem, as are photoblogs and videoblogs (nothing but videos in a blog is not considered good content for AdSense).

Photos and images should always have "alt text" tags so they can be "seen" by the AdSense bots and crawlers. They can't see an image if there is no text, so a website or blog of nothing but photos will look completely empty. A bunch of pages with nothing on them is a website under construction.

Websites built entirely of flash can create problems too - sometimes they can crawl them, and sometimes they can't. The best flash sites I have seen are the ones that also have a plain html version of the site for users without flash in their browsers. Some of the worst sites I've seen are those that require you to use a specific browser, like IE only sites.

Language - AdSense has a list of supported languages, and if the language your website was built in is not on that list, you won't be able to get an approved AdSense account. You can learn more about the languages AdSense supports at the AdSense Help Center.

In the end, there are some websites and content that are just not suitable for AdSense advertisers. Not everyone is granted an AdSense account.

Google Green?

No sermon here today, folks, but thanks to one of the "Top Contributors" (Dan) over on the AdSense Help forums, we're going to shoot for taking a news article and video the "viral" route.

What that means is, grab the link for the article, and post to your blogs - everybody. This will help get the word out that not every website who talks about Google or AdSense is on the "up and up".

You know all those "almost scams" and "google scams" we've been talking about? Well, here in this article at the link Fox News tells it like it is. Let your friends know there are places they need to be careful of- especially if they are thinking about signing up for AdSense.

Fox Twin Cities - Investigating Google Green

Remind your friends, if they want to apply for AdSense, then they should do it right at the Google AdSense homepage and not anywhere else.

Getting Started with AdSense and Blogger

Everyday on the Google AdSense forums you'll see lots of questions about using AdSense with Blogger blogs. Today's post will help you get started using AdSense on Blogger. More complex questions will come later, and of course you can always post a specific question to the comments, or use Google's AdSense Help Forum.

1. Can I use AdSense with Blogger?

• yes, Blogger blogs accept AdSense code very easily.

2. What's the best way to sign up with my blog?

• Blogger has a "monetize" link which many people use to get an AdSense account, and currently, if you try to apply for adsense without using this monetize link, you'll get rejected for "domain ownership issues.
• Adsense does not accept "subdomains" for their applications, so signing up at the Adsense home page with a blogger URL will get your application rejected because a blogger URL is a subdomain. To avoid that, you need to apply using the monetize link.
• Using the monetize link in blogger lets Adsense know that this is a blogger URL, which is acceptable to use for Adsense, so please do not try to sign up at the Adsense homepage for your blog.

3. My Adsense account for my blog was approved. How do I add the code to my blogger?

• There are different options for adding AdSense code to your blogger. You can use the monetize link to place the ads, you can use the Adsense Gadget in Blogger, or you can use a Text Gadget and add code you generate from your AdSense Account.
• See this step-by-step tutorial (includes snapshots and text) for the ways you can place your code on blogger blogs.

4. Why don't all of my ads show up on my blogger? I have all the code, but you can't see all the ads.

• The main reason for this is that you probably have too many of the same kind of ad on one page.
• AdSense only allows for 3 ad units, 3 link units and 2 AdSense for search boxes on one page.
• When you choose to have the AdSense ads display below each post, the number of posts allowed to display on a page has something to do with this problem. Many people leave the "posts per page" set at the default, wich I think is 5. That means there may already be three ads on the page (one ad after every 2nd post). What happens is that any other ads of the same type you put on your page won't display.
• There are two ways to remedy this. Set your post count per page to 1, 2 or 3 posts per page. This will result in one or two ads being displayed leaving you one ad of the same type for another spot. Or you can change the add type. You can use ad units between your posts, and ad links in your sidebar, or vice versa. This allows you to display 3 ads between your posts, and 3 ads in your sidebar (or below your header if you choose).

5. How much does it cost to use Blogger and AdSense?

• Nothing. Google provides both services freely. If anyone asks you pay anything for a Blogger blog or an AdSense account, then you are in the wrong place.
• There are many websites on the internet that ask you for money in exchange for providing information about earning money with AdSense, and they trade on the Google name, but they aren't associated with Google, and their practice is not condoned by Google.
• Information about AdSense or Blogger is available freely from their respective home pages at Google. You should never pay for something that is offered free. Any payments you might make to these other sites go to them, not to Google and Google cannot help you get your money back, nor will they refund you something they didn't charge you for.
  

Using "No Right Click" Codes - For Those Who Think They Need It

Lots of people seem to want to use the "no right click" on their web pages. The code is simple, but for the most part, it's a fairly useless protection against image thieves. Anybody who really wants the image will know how to get it (even I can do it) even if the code is present.

About the only people it will deter are those casual surfers who might happen upon your site and think "oh, pretty pic" and hit the right click - they'll get the "right click not available" and move on to somewhere else. Even then, if they want to use it in a blog or something else bad enough, they'll try a screen capture, and there's not much that will stop that.

For those who just have to use it (be aware that "no right click" also means that none of the functions in the right click menu work - none - when you use this you disable all of the right click functions, not just the copy).

So here's a code provided by WebmasterTools 3 (the free version - rather old, but still useful) which they also provided online (last check I couldn't find the site). The part that says "Right Click Not Available" is the part the viewer sees when they try to right click on the images on that page - that text can be changed to anything you want to use.

The script below gets inserted between the head tags of your webpage.



For those asking for instructions on using the code - it's as I mentioned above - place the entire code as shown between the head tags on your web page (the head tags look like this: <> (the beginning of the header section and < /head > (the end of the header section) ). To see the tags you need to be able to access the html portion (the code) of your web page.

Don't Let Your Work Become "Duplicate Content"

In at least one of my recent endeavours I've come to realize that taking time to protect your work online can be pretty important for some things.

Not just images, graphics and photos, but your written work, like blog posts and articles, stories and poetry. Pretty much anything you put on the net.

Some folks won't worry much about whether someone has copied their blog post or photos, but for those who are concerned, there are some steps you can take that help. While there is no real protection for anything you put out on the internet, making the effort can do two things - offer protection from those who just don't know any better, and help to educate them about copyright and plagiarism.

Anyone who follows any of my free blogs will already know that I'm pretty happy to share much of what I do with others. That's just my nature. What I'm not happy to see is other people claiming my work as their own. While none of these methods shown here will really stop anyone who is out to copy your work and put their name on it, some of them will help you find any work of yours that's been used elsewhere.


Copyscape is a service that will search the internet for written work. They offer a free service (limited, but it works) and paid programs for greater coverage. You simply put in the url of the page where your work is displayed (a blog page or website page), hit enter and wait. It will search around the net looking for whatever article or written work is on your page and then list places it found it, if any.

CopyrightSpot works essentially the same as Copyscape, though the service is at present, completely free. It is, however, still in "alpha testing", but it does seem to work reasonably well. Like copyscape, it is designed for the written word. You can also use their logo to show that you check your work against their service on a regular basis. While this won't stop someone out to purposely copy your stuff, it might give them pause if they realize you will eventually find them.

For images, the same folks who put out CopyrightSpot have MyFree Copyright. Here, you can upload a small version of any image or graphic and create a footprint for it, then get a registration number to place on your images, along with the logo if you want. This service also works to protect a file of written work, or text whether it's a web page or pdf or other form of written work. It too is provided freely. Each item you register generates an email to your account, showing the date of registration and registration number. While this is not the same as registering work with the Registry Office, it can provide a "time stamp" for your work, so if it's necessary to provide proof that someone else copied the work from you, this can be helpful. Like any other service, it doesn't stop unauthorized uses (nothing really does), but it has it's uses.

And one more place where you can upload files, including chk sums and other details and get it time stamped to help protect your ownership of your work. Copyclaim is also free, so those who write articles, poetry, tutuorials or upload .pdf files might find it useful. Note: it looks like Copyclaim is defunct.


TinEye doesn't actually offer protection, but it can help you find your images on the internet. It's still in beta, and has a ways to go before it will become really useful, but it too works if images are used in a lot of different places. TinEye is essentially a "reverse lookup tool" for images - you can upload a low res version of your image and it will search around the net and list places where it's found. If you prefer not to upload an image, you can use the Firefox browser plugin, where you simply right click on your image, and it will search from that. Note that with the browser plugin, this won't work if you are using the clear gif method of protecting your image, because all TinEye will see is no image and a clear gif. There is also a version for macs.

The image bank TinEye uses to search is still somewhat limited, so if it doesn't find your image, that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't in use somewhere else, it just means that wherever the image is, TinEye hasn't indexed that particular site or space yet. The more people who use TinEye and submit sites for indexing, the better it will get.

Get the TinEye Plugin for Firefox here.

Get the mac version here.

While there are other similar services for protecting your copyrights, many are paid services. If you earn your living with imaging or writing, you might want to invest in a paid service, and/or register your work at the Registry Office for your country or state. But for the average blogger who might have a need to prove the work belongs to them, these free services should be sufficient.

(originally posted by the writer, me, on another of my blogs)