Low Value Content – Rejected by Adsense

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

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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.