There are usually a couple of simple things that are overlooked that can cause your application to be delayed or totally denied for Google's Adsense program. Google wants your site approved and has made a lot of efforts to ensure that quality sites are approved quickly. So I will go over the things you need to do to make sure that you can get your site approved quickly.
Minimum Number of Posts
Make sure that you have enough content for Google to be able to know what your site will be about. Your blog will need to have between 40 and 50 well-written articles and they should be around 1000-2000 words in length. In general, you will want to keep most of your blog posts in this range not only for Google Adsense but also to make sure that your posts are going to be picked up by Google's search engine as well.
Getting your site to the point where it is generating organic traffic and leads from Google, Yahoo, and Bing are extremely important to get to a profitable point in the life of your blog. Along with the 40 to 50 posts, your site should have at least 50 pages in total these pages can be made up of Blog posts, contact pages, about pages, store pages, etc. As long as you hit that 50-page mark you should be good.
This is a pretty easy task for most CMS-based blogs, but may be tricky if you are still hand-coding everything. If you are hand coding your blog pages, then STOP and read up on our top CMS list and pick one and install it. If you are on Blogger or another similar site then you should also consider moving into your own hosted CMS, you can see some of our plans that may be affordable for you.
Important Pages you should include in your blog:
- Privacy Policy
- Disclaimer Policy
- Terms of Use/Terms of Usage
- Contact Us / Contact me
- About Us / Bio page
Meet the Internet's Godfather Google
Google should be the first program you apply for and get approved for. If you are attempting to get approval for Google's Adsense makes sure to not have any other third-party affiliates, ad networks, or sponsors on your site. At least until you get approved. Make sure to present a clean and uncluttered page to Google as the employees reviewing your site will make sure to manually check each page on your site. Once you do get approved it is not an issue to run an affiliate program alongside your Google Adsense program but to start to make sure to get a great impression from Google.
Stay away from Infolinks, Chitika, Yahoo Ads or any other third party network to get the first impression clean on your website. Make sure you put only the fresh content and some regular widgets on the website.
Also, stay away from affiliate links such as hosting programs, Amazon affiliates, Clickbank or any other until your account is approved.
Prohibited Topics
Some studies have also proved that Google AdSense might reject your approval if your website is on event blogging and micro niche blogging. In this particular blogging, you limit your blog content to only one particular subject and create a spam domain around it to rank higher. Eg:(Mayweather vs Pacquiao Match Online). In some cases. If you have observed Google Ads in these of websites, it is most likely that they have applied for the account on another website and then placed the ads on an event niche blogging site to earn quick money.
Statistics show that your account will go through a faster approval process if you have more quality articles on Health, Internet Marketing, Business, Law, Technology, Entrepreneurship, Travel, Lifestyle and Social Media. Google will take your application as a serious offense if your website contains any of the prohibited content mentioned in this link here. So make extra sure that your site does not include those items.
Great Design means Great Profits
Google puts a high value on website designs. They want users to have a really good experience when they come to your blog. Your blog's designs should be clean, easy to navigate, the text should be clear and legible (no fancy fonts on main content). In addition, they want your site to load properly and look good for phones and tablets. This not only helps getting approved for Google Adsense, but can have a very positive effect on your website's Search Engine Optimization and will help your blog get better rankings on Google. It really comes down to making logical decisions when it comes to choosing a design for your blog. If you're looking for a design for your blog, check out our theme store to see if maybe one of the designs suites your needs.
Connecting Your Site
Additionally, if you have not already done so you should install Google Analytics on your site as well as other tools like the Google Webmaster Program, Bing's Webmaster Program, and Yahoo's Webmaster programs. These programs will be helpful not only in speeding the process of getting Approved for Google Adsense, but provide powerful information about how well your website is performing and who is coming to your site from the various search engines. These tools can often be integrated together to make stronger connections and data tools for you. For many bloggers, this can be overwhelming at first, so having a professional help and guide you through the information may well be worth your time, you can see one of our blog maintenance plans to see if maybe this is the right option for you.
XML, Alexa, and Robots.txt Oh My!
In addition to connecting your site to the various search engines most important programs, you should also set up an XML Sitemap that can be scanned by these services, it will get your posts and pages indexed faster by the various programs, and is also used as a part of Google's Adsense evaluation of your site.
Alexa Rankings are controversial, some people question whether or not Google cares about the rankings on Alexa, but I feel that it is best to get a good Alexa Rating in order to help improve your chances of getting approved as well as increasing traffic to your website. To find out your Ranking, just install the Alexa toolbar on your preferred browser and load your website. The Alexa toolbar will show you your site's ranking. In another post, we will go over how to increase this ranking on your blog.
Robots.txt is another thing that you should have for your site. This simple text file will tell Google and the other search engine bots which pages they should and should not scan. This gives them a good indication of things that you feel should not be included in the search engines index and can help you prevent duplicate content issues. Another similar file that I'm starting to encourage more and more sites to use is the Humans.txt file. This file is similar to the Ending credits of a movie and lists the team of developers, designers, and contributors to your site. While it has no direct effect on things now, in the future it may be useful for looking up and finding old developers who performed specific services for your site.
Traffic Levels
It goes without saying that Google is looking for websites that have an adequate amount of traffic in order to make the investment in your application worth the time. So do your best to get a good steady level of traffic coming into your blog before you apply in order to give Google what it needs to approve you. You can do this by sharing your posts with friends, family, and blogging communities to start, but in the long run, you really need to make sure that your blog has had a professional SEO make sure that everything is in line. Most SEOs will request a subscription over some period of time, but there are some that can put in all the automated items that you would need in order to self-SEO your site. This is more a matter of your budget and time available to put into making sure things are correct. Having a professional can make a huge difference in the level of traffic your site receives.
Domains and Email
One last thing on the technical side of your blog is doing everything you can to get an actual domain name and an email account associated with that domain. This makes a huge impression on Google as they see free domains from sites like blogger as inferior and possibly temporary, whereas having a registered domain that has been active for a couple years will go a long way to show Google that your site has the longevity that they need in order to approve your site for an Adsense program. Once you have a domain, get an email account set up for that domain and start using it as your Primary email address when doing anything for your blog. This also goes a long way to credibility and validating your site.
Wrapping up the paperwork
So once you have all the technical things in place, you will want to make sure that you have a business phone number, address, and bank account that can be used for your blog. Having these things are important and will help you when it comes to tax time, this is also another one of those things Google sees as a validation of your blog as a business and not just a hobby.