Last Updated on February 1, 2020 by Aram
I want to share with you my experience in applying my blog, codingsonata.com, to Google AdSense and successfully getting it accepted in the ad program.
Honestly, It was not an easy task to achieve at all, given the gazillion number of websites out there that are applying for Google AdSense, and the high competency between the niche websites.
So how to Get Accepted in Google AdSense?
The most important thing that you need to understand that Google will not accept your website that has no valuable and genuine content.
The site review is a very long and intensive process. You must provide a value for your website or blog users in order to get accepted in Google AdSense. If your website or blog has only outbound links or images and includes all copy/pasted paragraphs and texts with no genuine content, then it is very likely that your submission will be rejected.
This process is pretty similar to applying for a visa. You have to sound reasonable and apply the proper proofs that your application is legitimate and you won’t be doing anything illegal in the traveling country and you deserve to be granted the visa.
So, let’s get started to see how to get accepted in Google AdSense program:
Although the following are not bulletproof rules for AdSense acceptance, here are some important guidelines for your website or blog to solidify your submission and give Google the adequate justifications to get accepted in Google AdSense.
Genuine and Quality Content
This is the most important and critical part. Your website must provide a quality genuine content is uniquely crafted by you.
You just cannot get AdSense approved on your website if you have no content to show.
If your content is actually a copy from different sites, then you will never get a chance to get accepted with Google AdSense.
Uniqueness and quality are key factors here.
If you don’t have a valuable and unique content to share, then don’t ever try to submit for Google AdSense.
Arrange your ideas, craft your words and start sharing your great work, then Google AdSense will be more than happy to accept your submission.
Proper Traffic Sources
Website traffic sources usually come from 4 main types of sources, which includes
Organic Search, Direct, Social and Referral
Below is an acquisition excerpt from my blog’s Google Analytics showing my users for January 2020
A normal website should have a combination of all forms, however, the traffic that is generated from organic searches is usually the most important one, which you should always make your pages are search engine optimized (SEO), and your links are search engine friendly (SEF).
In fact, almost all of the topics mentioned in this article contribute to enhance your website visibility for search engines.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a gigantic topic that takes a whole blog of tens of articles to cover its main concepts and strategies. Yet, I will try to cover in-depth in a different article.
Properly Functioning Pages
You have to make sure that your site is properly functioning and is showing no errors.
You can always open the developer tools F12 and review the console or network for any visible errors and report directly to your developer or webmaster unless otherwise you are the developer, then you should be able to fix the problems yourself and republish your website.
Having errors on your website, due to whatever reason, will render your website malfunctioning or misbehaving, thus leading to broken pages and unpleasant experience for your users, and believe me, Google AdSense will be discouraged to place ads on a disturbed and buggy website.
Good Website Performance
The website response time has to be fast. A generic rule of thumb is around 3 seconds loading time is considered a very fast loading.
This is of course related to content and front end technology that is used for the website. It is always good practice to use professional tools to analyze your site to understand how it is actually performing, for this I would highly recommend that you use Google PageSpeed Insights tool.
This tool does a comprehensive site analysis on both mobile and desktop devices and provides you with a score for your website rendered for each device type.
The score reflects your website’s overall loading performance and rendering on the devices. The tool shows a detailed overview of all issues related to your website and what are the possible solutions to fix these issues.
Responsive design
This is very important nowadays, and it is actually essential that your design to be responsive and friendly with all types of devices, including mobile phones, tablets, laptops and desktop screens.
Google validates your site versus different type of devices to make sure that the ads will be delivered in the most efficient way, so you must have a mobile friendly and properly functioning site on all devices.
Having a responsive design isn’t a complicated matter nowadays, thanks to html5 and the modern front-end UI libraries and frameworks, such as the almighty Twitter Bootstrap framework or the less simpler option Skeleton and many other tools that are there for you or your web developer to build your website.
And in case your website or blog is based on wordpress, then that is even easier with the ready-made templates are built on top of responsive design structure, you just need to select the template and apply it to your website.
Well-structured Pages
All your website pages must be interconnected with internal links between pages, these must be a well-structured hierarchy that at any point of time a user must be able to return to any of your main menu pages without hassle.
Links also must never be broken, and the design must always show links in the header or footer sections with a clear representation on each link.
Adequate usage of Rich Media
Your website pages should look nice by displaying different multimedia formats.
You should never just include text or just include images, an adequate mix of both must be there to balance between images and text with the proper usage of styling and formatting, these include:
- Paragraphs: Not more than 20 word per paragraph
- Line Spacing
- Having enough headings and subheadings
- Bolding/Italicizing/Underlining wherever needed
- Internal and external links, wherever possible, with the proper wording.
Avoid Copyrighted Materials
Does not use copyrighted materials including fonts/images/videos unless properly credited as per the material owner request.
Whenever you are using copyrighted materials always make sure to properly read the usage terms and policies otherwise this will cause a copyright infringement which might lead you to a potential lawsuit consequences and of course Google will reject your submission.
Include a Privacy Policy
Having a Privacy policy in your website or blog is imperative for Google AdSense Acceptance.
Your user must clearly know how are you dealing with their personal information, whenever they are filling any sort of form on your website, including login, sign up, contact or any other sort of data capturing that you might do.
Your privacy policy is preferred to be hosted on your root folder and the page link should be clear that it will open the privacy policy, so you can take my blog’s privacy policy as an example of a good link codingsonata.com/privacy-policy
You can always use privacy policy generators to help you build a comprehensive text of privacy policy that will feel natural to your website users.
Include About and Contact Pages
Always make sure to include an easy way for your users to contact you.
also a good description about you or your company would be great to have, to give a summary about your website or company, or even about yourself in case it was your own blog, like mine 🙂
Include a sitemap
A sitemap is an xml-based file that represents the structure of your website in xml format, this file usually should be hosted on the root folder of your website.
So in my website here, codingsonata.com , i have a sitemap under codingsonata.com/sitemap.xml , this has been generated to me by JetPack Plugin Under WordPress.
Make sure you have a similar one.
Of course, you are free to use the tool that it is appropriate for you.
If you are not sure how to create one yourself, then you can always use a tool to create it for you, you can try generate one on XML Sitemaps generator.
Frequently Updated Content
You have to make sure that the content is updated frequently, you have to keep adding more and more content, and of course, the content must always be unique, providing a high value for the users and therefore would potentially bring traffic for your website.
Your website should be visited frequently, you don’t have to have a website that accepts thousands of visitor per day to be able to apply for Google AdSense, but a minimum of around 50 visitors/per day should suffice for your submission. Again, this number is just based on my experience when I’ve applied to Google AdSense and got accepted.
Long Term Domain Expiry
Your website’s domain should not be expiring soon. The more your domain is valid the better your submission status will be.
Having a long term domain expiry will indicate that you are serious about your website and you have long term plans for it.
Google has to make sure that for a relatively long duration, its advertisers’ ads will be shown on your website, its not going to disappear after some short time.
Apply to Google Search Console and Google Analytics
These are wonderful tools that you can (and should) use to optimize your website
Google Search Console provide you with amazing tools to optimize your website versus the Google Search results. It lets you see the search traffic that is brought to you, detect any indexing issues and shows you how Google Search will be seeing your website pages.
Google Analytics is yet another great tool that provides a complete set of metrics, live traffic analysis with a sophisticated reporting functionality to show a full insight of everything happening with users whenever they land on your website.
Just the important thing to note here, is that having or not having any of the above Google tools, doesn’t contribute to the acceptance/rejection of your Google AdSense Submission. These tools are there to help you optimize and analyze your website in order to make it better and improve its traffic.
Summary
Applying the above guidelines or tips doesn’t strictly imply that your website will be accepted, it all depends on your content and readiness. But, all or most of these points will definitely help you, not only to get accepted in Google AdSense but also it will help bring you more traffic and improve your organic search traffic.
Let me know down in the comments section about your experience with Google AdSense, do you have a website or blog and planning to apply for Google AdSense?
Bonus
Enjoy this lovely musical piece by J.S. Bach: English Suite No 1 BWV 806 A major András Schiff