How To Get Google AdSense Approval 2024
This post is also available as a video on my YouTube channel.
I’ve had four sites approved for Google AdSense in the last five years. The first three sites went through the approval process within a few days back in 2019 and 2020/21, but the most recent one, which was just approved in August 2024, sat in the getting ready state (which means Google are evaluating your site), for 15 long days before being rejected. I’d never had a rejection from Google before. So I made some changes and resubmitted the site (I actually spent 10 hours straight working on it to make the changes I thought were needed). After that another 16 long days passed before I got the acceptance email on my second attempt. See the bottom of this post for exactly what I changed.
It’s frustrating when you’re waiting on approval and then you get a rejection without any clear indication as to what you’re doing wrong – Google does provide some feedback, so I’ll come to that in a minute.
From my wanderings around the web recently it seems that AdSense approval is getting harder to obtain. I do believe that Google is doing its best to ensure that quality content is provided to users (and remember those users are both readers and advertisers), which is why it is getting harder. So that is actually a good thing for all of us – until you’re the one wondering why you can’t get accepted into the programme.
So here’s my rundown on the things you need to do to get Adsense approval in 2024.
Item 1 – Watch The AdSense Approval Video Playlist
I’ve linked to this at the bottom of the post. It’s kind of painful to watch at times as the whole thing is done as a role play, but it will give you the basics you need to have in place:
- Original, helpful content
- Decent navigation
- No tricking Google – honestly it’s not worth trying to spam your way into anything these days
If you’ve watched those videos and are still wondering what you’re doing wrong, the remaining items are my personal take on what you need to do to qualify.
Item 2: Have An Obvious Home Page
Make sure it’s obvious what your site is about when you land on the home page. What is a user getting when they visit your site? Make sure it’s so obvious what your site provides that even a robot can tell. Although actually robots are not so stupid these days. Also – make sure you aren’t falling into the trap of showing what you’re going to provide in the future. Create a home page that tells google what you can gain from being on your site right now.
Item 3: Provide Original (Non-AI) Content
There are people out there using AI to generate ebooks and online content and getting away with it. It won’t last. AI content isn’t what the public wants, as much as we enjoy it as a novelty. A human wants another human’s input. There has always, and probably will always be an inherent distrust of computers by people. So AI has its uses, but it isn’t for writing web copy. Google knows. And if you do manage to fool it now, you’re on borrowed time.
Item 4: No Keyword Abuse
If anyone is still stuffing posts and websites with keywords you can stop. We’re long past the days when that is an effective strategy. You need genuine and useful content. Sorry – that might sound like hard work (and it can be!). But it’s what Google is trying to find and promote. Also, if you’re creating original and useful content, you literally don’t need to worry about keywords because the natural way that we write and talk will already encompass everything that Google needs to know about what you are sharing.
Item 5: Provide Contact Details
Make sure your website has a functioning way to contact you. There’s no indication that this is necessary, but every one of my websites has had a Contact Me page and the most recent one was missing that on rejection as I hadn’t gotten around to setting it up. If you don’t want to be contacted, why are you online sharing your knowledge?
Item 6: Provide An About Page
Make sure your website has a solid “about” page. Whether you are an organisation or an individual, when other humans read your website they can be curious about who has provided the information and why. We are built for connection. And Google likes to know who you are too. Your About page is an opportunity to explain why you are able to provide content that is share-worthy. You don’t have to be a professor of xyz, but you should be able to explain why you have any authority in what you are saying. If you’ve been arm-knitting for 12 years tell people that and show off some of your work. If you’ve got an eye for interior design, show people parts of your home. If you’ve volunteered on a phone line for 5 years, talk about it.
An about page shows integrity and transparency in who you are and what you are providing. I believe these are positive signals in Google’s eyes.
Item 7: Correct Legal Pages
This is an obvious one but make sure your privacy policy and cookie policy are present and correct. I had ads stop running on a site for not having implemented the correct cookie policy a few years back, so it makes sense to me that you need to get this in place before you submit your site.
Item 8: Minimum Traffic?
Google says there are no minimum traffic requirements. I don’t know how I feel about this one. I’ve never submitted a site that had less than around 500 sessions a month (which in itself is pretty small fry). But if your traffic is at zero, then what would be the point of advertisers paying to be on it? I think you need a base level of traffic – which can realistically take a few months to see. My only advice on this point is to keep going and stay consistent. Non-viral traffic doesn’t appear overnight. It comes from machine observation of how small groups of users interact with your content. Positive interactions (like a longer engagement time, and repeat visits) send a signal to say this might be worth exposing more widely. You can’t trick this algorithm – to some extent, you do have to wait for things to gain traction. Have patience, but if you are getting any traffic organically, it’s worth applying – they can only say no.
Item 9: Don’t Delete Once Submitted
If you log in every day and there’s NOTHING except the “getting ready” status and no updates it can feel like you need to poke Google into action by deleting the site and adding it again. I have definitely felt this urge to make something happen rather than wait longer.
Don’t do this! If you don’t get accepted within a few days it means they’re taking a look at your site and how people interact with it. No one knows how much is automatic evaluation and how much is considered by a real person, but the bottom line is if they want two weeks of data on your site, and you delete it because it seems like nothing is happening, you’ve just set yourself back to the start of the two week evaluation period. So submit it, and then redirect your energy to working on your website as usual. My recent submission was two weeks with a rejection and then two weeks with an approval. Something is going on there, so let it do what it needs to do.
Item 10: Read The Google Insights
Probably the most important point – if you get rejected, Google will give you an insight into what you can improve under the site link in AdSense.
The insight is restricted to links to generic information about improving your site, so it’s not specifically helpful. You need to interpret it somewhat. Google mentioned my content was thin, which I knew wasn’t the case as I had well over 50 long-form articles written. So I figured that the issue was Google couldn’t make sense of my site’s content, or couldn’t easily determine what I was trying to share. That can be a navigation issue, category problem, content duplication issue, or just the fact that your home page doesn’t explain what you can do and learn when you arrive.
Read through everything that Google has linked in its reasons for your rejection and consider anything you can do to improve your website so those things can no longer be true.
Okay, so those are my top tips for getting Adsense approved, but I’ll also do a quick run-down of exactly what I changed between rejection and acceptance on my website this time around:
Practical Steps I Took To Gain Acceptance After Initial Rejection
- I added a contact page as I’d not gotten around to setting one up.
- I updated my About page to actually say who I was and what I did. I think it had a skeleton page on there that had no photo or real information about me.
- I completely revamped my home page to clearly display the topics that I write about. This took hours, but the second version was a much better guide to what the site contained than the first one which was just a chronological list of posts.
- I improved all my categories by condensing them down into a handful of broad topics that I write about. If you do change your website structure like this, don’t forget to redirect the old pages to the new ones to preserve any existing traffic integrity.
- If you’re a WordPress user like me you might be aware of the historic issues of duplicate content through tags, categories and date archives. I set my date archives to noindex (I use the free rank math plugin to set no index requests), and deleted every tag I’d ever used. This removed a huge amount of duplicate content and effectively thin content (if you click a tag and it’s got 2 posts and nothing else with that tag, it’s looking pretty thin). This meant that a category contained a significant number of related posts and collected together the content I was providing in a more meaningful way.
- I continued adding and updating content – when I first submitted I didn’t have any recent posts as I’d imported older content from a deleted site. I also had a fair amount of half-finished pages where I was making updates. I got as much of this done as I could that day, resubmitted and then continued adding and improving every day for the next two weeks.
16 days later, I got my acceptance email. Hard-earned this time, compared to the previous three sites, but this time I probably submitted before the site was quite ready. It really helped me focus on what was important, and of course, once you are accepted that helps to provide motivation to keep on working on a site that brings value to other people.
Bonus tip for tax settings
You may see a warning about setting your tax status up correctly for Ireland. This is a bit of admin you need to do but without guidance, it’s not clear at all how on earth you do it.
I used the guide provided by GadgetUK in his video linked below.
He managed to dig out a post on the Google site by someone called Rob Paul who shared the steps you need to take to get the Ireland tax section completed properly. So a big thank you to GadgetUK for sharing this and definitely use this guide to help you get this done. It saved me hours of investigation into the answers needed on the tax form.
Good luck with your submission!
How to get Google AdSense approval in 2024.