Few months ago, I had applied for a new google adsense account. This blog post is my experience of getting it approved.

After applying, I was greeted with this email :

Welcome to AdSense!

Your application has been reviewed. Now you need to create your first ad
unit and implement the ad code on your site for the full activation of
your account. Only blank ads will appear at first until the final approval
goes through. Once your site is fully activated, you’ll receive a
confirmation email and begin to see live ads.

Please sign in to Google AdSense to create your first ad unit and get
fully approved by using this guided tour: http://goo.gl/sZIGZ *

* Unfortunately, if you’re using Internet Explorer the guided tour may not
work properly. If you experience problems, please copy this URL
http://goo.gl/sZIGZ and paste it into a different browser’s address bar.

For further information please visit the AdSense Academy:
http://goo.gl/4Pcko

Please keep in mind…

1. Please don’t click on your ads, even to test them — doing so isn’t
permitted by the AdSense program policies:
http://www.google.com/adsense/policies

2. You can add the AdSense code to a new page or site that complies with
our program policies at any time. There’s no need to inform us or apply
for a new account when you do. Please make sure our crawler can access any
webpage you place ad code on: http://goo.gl/NyUEy

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

 

I quickly placed my first ad on my website, and waiting eagerly for the account to be fully approved. After about 3 days, I get a mail which read like this :

Hello,

As mentioned in our welcome email, we conduct a second review of your
AdSense application once AdSense code is placed on your site(s). As a
result of this review, we have disapproved your account for the following
violation(s):

Issues:

- Unacceptable site content

———————

Further detail:

Unacceptable site content: In order to participate in Google AdSense,
publishers’ websites and application information must satisfy the
following guidelines:

*Your website must be your own top-level domain (www.example.com and not
www.example.com/mysite).
*Your domain must have been registered and active for at least 6 months
before you apply for AdSense.
*You must provide accurate personal information with your application that
matches the information on your domain registration.
*Your website must contain substantial, original content.
*Your site must comply with Google AdSense program policies:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=48182
which include Google’s webmaster quality guidelines:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769#quality.

If your site satisfies the above criteria in the future, please resubmit
your application and we’ll review it as soon as possible.

Bang ! All my enthusiasm down the drain. I was disappointed that my blog was rejected because this was the first time I had created a blog and I had painstakingly written every line in my blog. I immediately started searching for the error “Unacceptable site content” everywhere on the internet. A lot of the forums suggested that if your blog does not have enough posts, then adsense rejections like these are sent.

adsenseSo I started actively blogging for a few more months. I made sure that I atleast put up one blog post a week. After around 3 months, I submitted my blog again. I got rejected this time too with the same reason.

So I went to adsense forums and put up a question. A few people commented saying that my blog content had been copied from other websites. They used copyscape’s tool to point me to my own other domain “textoo.in” which had some posts from my blog. I was stunned thinking of the fact that how can google’s algorithm be so bad that even one article copied on to another of one’s own website cause such rejections. Because there were 20-30 other blog posts which were originals and were getting very good traffic. In fact some of my pages had 1000 unique visitors a day.

I then reapplied from a different gmail account thinking that maybe my previous account was jinxed. But got rejected again with the same reason. This time, I read through the rejection email thoroughly I had religiously followed every other instruction exception this one because I somehow thought that this cant cause a rejection. Then I went to my domain’s whois info and saw that it had a different postal address than the one I use right now. So I updated my whois info and also updated the gmail account’s address and ensured that they are the same. This time I applied using my domain’s email ID [email protected]. I had no hopes of getting an approval this time.

Waited for a week to see an email which read :

Congratulations!

Your Google AdSense application has been fully approved. Within a few hours you’ll begin to see live ads. Now you can get more value from your online content by showing relevant and engaging ads with AdSense.

Wow, it worked. The first thing that came to my mind was “how can google do this ?” Why can they give a reason saying “Wrong personal info” instead of “unacceptable site content” ?

Anyway, I added google ads to just 2 most popular pages on my blog. Both of them were related to a flash game about Kaun Banega Crorepati TV show which I created, from day one I started earning about 8-9 $ a day. In India, with just 9 $ every day, you can afford to rent a decent apartment in a non metro city and have 3 sumptuous meals a day and still have some money left in your pocket.

The better part was that the page which had the ads was a really old flash game and I was getting free money for something I created in my leisure time 6 years ago! I had tried adbrite before adsense, and it used to pay me 2 $ a day, so I was expecting more like 4-5 $.

Now I spend atleast 30 mins everyday to improve the game and the blog as a whole with the motivation to increase my adsense earnings.

Thanks Google for adsense !

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