Adding Google AdSense to Your Site – the Ultimate Guide

Who doesn’t want to make money from their blog and enjoy the life they always dreamt of? Getting AdSense Approval from Google is the dream of every blogger. But, wait. It’s not that easy.

How to Make Money Using Google AdSense?

Adding Google AdSense to your website or app is one of the best ways to monetize your site. This article will guide you on how to add Google AdSense to your site and how to troubleshoot common problems and rejection reasons.

What is Google AdSense?

Google AdSense is an ad network, meaning, it acts as an intermediary between publishers and advertisers. Basically, publishers who want to sell ad inventory on their websites can add their site to AdSense, and advertisers who want to promote their brand can use AdSense to make bids to buy the ad inventory (you can read more about ad networks here).

AdSense has changed the approval process and made this easy for new publishers. Here is how the overall process looks like:

  1. Ensure your website is compatible with AdSense
  2. Sign up for an AdSense account
  3. Login to your AdSense account
  4. Add the AdSense code
  5. Wait for 1-2 weeks for final review & approval/rejection

How to Submit Your Site to AdSense

  1. On your Google AdSense account (you can sign up and create your AdSense account here), click “Sites”
  2. Add your site to the “Sites” section
  3. Copy the code correctly as it appears on your AdSense home page and add it to your website
  4. Make sure your site is reachable
  5. Make sure your website complies with Google AdSense’s program policies
  6. Don’t remove your site from the “Sites” section

How to Verify Your Site’s Ownership for Google AdSense?

You can verify ownership of your site in 3 ways:

  • Add HTML code
  • Verify yourself in the search console
  • Add your Ads.txt file

See more here.

Checking Your Site’s Status on Google AdSense

Google uses a combination of human and automated systems to review sites, this process can take between 2 days to 2 weeks. To check the Google AdSense status of your website, go to “Sites” in your AdSense account. Your site will be listed as one of three things: “Needs attention”, “Getting ready” or “Ready”.

Understanding Your Website Status on Google Adsense

Google Adsense Getting Ready

The “Getting ready” Google adsense status means Google hasn’t finished running their checks. As we mentioned, this can take a couple of days to a couple of weeks.

Google Adsense Needs Attention

This Adsense status, “Needs attention” means that there are some issues that need fixing.

Google Adsense Ready

The Google AdSense “Ready” status means you’re ready to go, and all you need to do is to continue following Google AdSense program policies to continue showing ads.

Why Was My Site Rejected by Google Adsense?

Here are the most common reasons why AdSense won’t approve websites:

  • You didn’t approve ownership
  • Your site has low-quality traffic
  • Your site doesn’t have enough valuable content
  • Your site has replicated or duplicated content
  • Your site is not easy to navigate
  • Your account isn’t accessible for AdSense to reach and approve it
  • You have more than one account (If you want more than one AdSense account you can read more here)
  • Your site isn’t ready to show ads – AdSense couldn’t find any code, or the code is incomplete or malformed
  • Excessive advertising – your site has too many ads or popups
  • Using templated pages – the ad code appears on pages that have low to no value

Next, we’ll dive deeper into 3 of these reasons: Traffic, Content, and Navigation/Accessibility.

Traffic

AdSense rejects sites that don’t have enough traffic, poor-quality traffic, paid traffic, or non-organic traffic.

Adsense Rejects Websites That Have Deceptive Traffic, Such as

  • Auto-refresh
  • Hidden ads
  • A bot
  • A crawler masquerading as a legitimate user
  • Clickjacking
  • Adware
  • Malware
  • Cookie stuffing
  • Browser pre-rendering

Learn more on how you can help to prevent invalid traffic here.

Valuable Content

To get approved by AdSense it’s important to have high-quality content on your website. Good content encourages visitors to spend more time on your site, visiting multiple pages and motivates them to return later. Bad content makes a website unattractive for advertisers. Replicated, scraped, or duplicate content doesn’t drive traffic like original content.

Guidelines for Good Quality Content That’ll be Approved by Google AdSense

  • Content that gives your visitors a unique and valuable experience
  • Having enough content or articles so google can determine what your site is about
  • A site with fewer pages and better content will be more effective than a bigger site with poor-quality content
  • Regularly updating and adding original content
  • No duplicate content
  • No dangerous, illegal content

See Google AdSense’s guide on how to address issues with your site’s content here.

Website Navigation Accessibility

When the Google AdSense team checks your site, they look into how accessible it is. An accessible navigation bar is key to providing a good user experience. It should be effortless for the user to find what they want. You want to ensure that you don’t have any deceptive navigation. You don’t want to mislead your users into missing pages, irrelevant pages, or the wrong page.

If Google AdSense Rejected Your Website, Check Your Website’s Navigation

  • Alignment – Do the navigational elements line up on every device and appear consistently in different browsers?
  • Readability – Is the text on your website easy to read?
  • Functionality – Are your drop-down menus and icons working?
  • Accuracy – Are your navigational elements taking your users to the correct content?

How to Resubmit Your Google Adsense Application for Approval

If your site was rejected by AdSense (“Needs attention”), the reason for rejection will usually be mentioned (Examples: “Due to copyright material”, “URL you specified is not owned by you“, “insufficient content ” etc.)

Before you re-apply to AdSense, you should go over the reasons your site was rejected, understand what isn’t working/isn’t good enough and fix it, otherwise, you’ll just be rejected again. Using the recommendations in this article should help you get your site AdSense ready.

Conclusion

Google AdSense has strict policies regarding which site it approves, in order to protect advertisers and users.

In this article, we talked about how to add your site, what are the common reasons for rejection, and what you should do when your site is rejected.

If your website has good organic traffic, high-quality content, easy navigation and is compliant with Google AdSense program policies you shouldn’t have a problem getting it approved.

Want to Earn Extra?

If you are looking to monetize your website, you should consider using PurpleAds alongside Google AdSense to increase your earnings.

To get started, just create your publisher account here:

https://publishers.purpleads.io/#/signup

Here Are Some Useful Links:

  • Sign up for an AdSense account here.
  • You can check Google Publisher Policies here.
  • You can check AdSense Program Policies and Restrictions here.
  • You can check AdSense Site Approvals guidelines here.