Thanks Google.  I set-up this site in WordPress and then started blogging about issues I’ve encountered trying to self-host websites, mostly with using Cyberpanel instead of cpanel on a shared hosting service.  I started to get some traffic and the Site Kit plugin offers an easy way to integrate Adsense ads.  I was actually debating if I wanted to go that route, as I wasn’t sure I’d want ads on my site.  I figured with the traffic I was getting, I may as well start to monetize it.  I applied to Adsense through Site Kit, figuring it was an easy way to monetize a WordPress site.  

Back when I first started using Adsense, you would basically just place the ad code where ever you wanted an ad to show up – on any site.  I have multiple sites that show as approved within my Adsense control panel, but now you have to submit your sites to get approved.  I had one site that I applied for Adsense a year ago, but I applied before I had added content.  I was not surprised that that site got rejected.  This site, however, I was a bit surprised.

So here is the message I had in my Adsense account when I looked for more details:

Your site isn’t ready to show ads

Let’s look at these one step at a time

Minimum Content Requirements

This page has a lot of information but it can be simply summarized as
Content Policies: Nothing illegal, dangerous, stolen, deceptive, or sexually inappropriate.  Basically – nothing controversial or bad.
I think I’m safe here

Behavioral Policies:  A variety of things, like inaccurate adsense information, manipulate serving of ads, showing ads on blank pages, or lack of content
I think I’m safe here, but the “lack of content” can be subjective if they just think I don’t have enough unique content

Privacy-Related Policies: Privacy policy and not doing anything deceptive with user information
Oops – I didn’t add a privacy policy yet.  I’ll do that.

Make sure your site has unique high quality content and a good user experience

Provide enough unique content.  This may be a potential criticism – it’s hard to know what their actual threshold would be for this.  I currently have about 30 articles.  Not a huge site, but also not “no content”.

No duplicate content.  A few of my articles cover the same issues, but covering the information from a slightly different angle. I guess this could be a potential criticism, but I don’t think my site is anywhere close to abusive in this area.  It certainly wasn’t intentional duplicate content.  It was just addressing a problem that I thought was fixed, but wasn’t, and explaining the new approach.

Build a good user experience with navigational elements.   I think my site layout is pretty good.  Sure, maybe it could be better, but I don’t see this as being an issue to not have gotten approved.

Thin content

It’s interesting that the link is to a section in the “manual actions” report of the Search Console, with the title “Thin content with little or no added value”.  My Google Search Console does not show any manual actions.  I assume you’d have to have really bad thin content to justify a manual action in the search console.  I don’t know if the Adsense rejection was customized or if this is a generic list of items to address.  This is essentially the same as the “Provide enough unique content” issue above.  I do like that they include a video from Matt Cutts.

And the webmaster quality guidelines are pretty obvious.

Bottom line (literally in this case) – Low Value Content means that – I need to have more content on the site that will be seen as useful to visitors.  Fair enough.  I’ll keep on blogging and re-submit again once I’ve added more quality content.

First, I created a website (this one), and added content.  I’m starting to get a little bit of search traffic organically.  The most important part of monetizing a site is getting traffic to the site.  That’s easier said than done and beyond the scope of this article.  Perhaps some day I will reveal what I’ve learned about SEO – as far as what works and what doesn’t.  The essential answer you should know is that you need to create good content and then I find that good link building is still an essential part of SEO.

Second, I installed the Google Site Kit plugin for WordPress.  Go ahead and find it in the list of plug-ins and install it.  You need to have a google account and connect it through Site Kit.  It is pretty self-explanatory to get it started.  I use it for analytics and the Google search console.  Both of these tools are essential to building traffic.

Third, I waited until I had written at least a moderate amount of content and also started to get traffic to the site.  Over the last 28 days I’ve had 158 clicks according to the Google search console.  I am primarily interested in traffic coming from organic search, and I find this is the best measure.

Fourth, now that I have content and traffic, I am trying to add Adsense ads.  Site kit makes it easy.  You enable it through the plug-in, then you have to submit your site on the adsense site to get approved.  In the distant past, you could put your adsense ads on any site and they’d show up.  I’m not sure when they started to require sites to get approved, but I had a small site idea and signed up when I first started that site – and it did not get approved.  They said to resubmit after the site is more developed.  So, I’ll see if this site is now developed enough, with 158 clicks / month.  Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.

I enabled auto ads, mainly to make it easy to verify my site and get ads showing once it is approved.  I have a few other wordpress sites with auto ads and I have found that it was VERY aggressive in how it places ads.  Way too many ads and they always place some above the fold.  It’s ironic because I’m used to stern warnings in SEO that Google had an above the fold penalty for SEO.  Basically, you wanted to make sure you had content clearly visible when someone first lands on a page, before they start to scroll.  If you put a giant ad right there, especially on mobile, the visitor gets none of the content and only sees the ad – and maybe a title of an article.  I have no idea how much of a factor it is for SEO, but I also find the sites a turn-off if you get bombarded with ads.

So, I went into the ad settings and I turned it to the absolutely lowest ad load.  There is a setting on the adsense site, after selecting the site, to see where it will place sample auto ads.  I also removed the ad placement that is above the fold for mobile.  Yes, I am sacrificing click through rates, as those ads definitely perform the best.

So now I’ll wait and see.  It’ll be interesting if Adsense is doing manual site reviews, as that is very un-googley – their goals used to always be to automate everything, which would allow it to scale everything.  Humans are hard to scale.  Computers are easy to scale.  If adsense is doing a manual review, they’ll have the privilege of seeing this article related to monetizing the site.  Sort of like an Inception of ads and site reviews.  I’m guessing the main approval process is automated though, so no Googler is likely to find their way here.

Last, as I hinted at above, I find it very frustrating that the search side of google seems to run completely compartmentalized from the adsense side of google.  If they worked in concert, the adsense auto ads would be delivered in the exact way that Google search encourages websites to display ads – as unobtrusive as possible.

Of course, I also suspect that most people who visit this site on a computer will have an ad blocker installed.  I also don’t believe in hiding my site because someone uses an ad blocker.  Maybe I’ll change my mind at some point, but I suspect that most people would just leave the site if I forced them to disable their ad blocker.

I hope to make occasional posts with the success of this approach.