eARNING TRICK: webmaster guidelines

AdSense's Unacceptable Content Rejection - What is it?

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIEprxLsNxt80-ki0KL7TgaJtbJ2YGzBaHOxC6tT1DdNqmsA_97W0hUs6hqBtoS0k7PnWToyiky3_FqFYfgdHYcZEnOnzKI9ilIZ3Qz5aaSU57LzwPridyD8unuL3i2yl3OzoMy6lipeg/s1600/DearAdsense.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIEprxLsNxt80-ki0KL7TgaJtbJ2YGzBaHOxC6tT1DdNqmsA_97W0hUs6hqBtoS0k7PnWToyiky3_FqFYfgdHYcZEnOnzKI9ilIZ3Qz5aaSU57LzwPridyD8unuL3i2yl3OzoMy6lipeg/s320/DearAdsense.jpg" width="243" /></a></div>It seems like this is the question everyone's asking right now. There are more and more of these rejection questions showing up in the<a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdSense?hl=en"> AdSense Help forums,</a> and most people seem uncertain about what this rejection means. For the most part,  Adsense isn't all that clear about what to do in order to correct this, and won't spell out precisely what the issue is. In some cases, the unacceptable content is easy to spot when you compare the person's website against the AdSense Program Policies, but it isn't always as simple as that - particularly when English is not the publisher's native language. Some of the reasons for unacceptable site content that we've been able to come up with in the forums are as follows: <ol><li>- content that doesn't meet adsense policy (read the policies here: <a href="https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=48182">https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=48182</a>)</li><li>- content that doesn't meet the webmaster guidelines (<a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769">http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769</a>) Although the Webmaster Guidelines are listed as "guidelines", AdSense publishers are required to follow these guidelines, making them as important as the Adsense Program Policies. When you are applying to become a publisher, or when you are a publisher, the Webmaster Guidelines are no longer guidelines - they are a requirement, so you'll need to consider these as rules you must follow.</li><li>- content that isn't original (articles and content you didn't write). Since the inception of "<a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html">Caffeine</a>", AdSense has been systematically disabling blogs and websites with copied content, auto-written contents, contents of little to no value (re-purposed content from other websites), written content that doesn't make sense or reads as gibberish, and has been rejecting blogs and websites of this nature in the last few months. If you apply with a blog or website with contents such as this, be prepared to receive a rejection notice. What you need is original content that you've created yourself.</li><li>- no content, or very little content. AdSense requires each blog or website to contain sufficient content. If you have a blog with one or two posts, that's not going to be good enough for AdSense to approve. If your website has only one page, then you'll probably get rejected, unless it's a very big place with a LOT of original content.  If you apply with a site that has "no content", then your "content" is non-existent, which makes it unacceptable content.</li><li>- blank pages in your website. AdSense doesn't want to see your proposed website, or a website under development. They want your website to be complete, and easy to navigate. It shouldn't have a redirect for the domain URL (unless you've used a 301 redirect), it shouldn't have a frame on the URL that calls the website from another URL (it needs to be a direct URL), it shouldn't have links that don't work or are broken, and it shouldn't have links that lead to blank pages with no content, or with only "ipsum lorem" text. That's the latin text you often see on template pages when you purchase a template or get a free site template. That text is nothing but gibberish - it's meant as a place holder, and you need to replace that with your own text.</li><li>- copyright infringements (images or other contents you don't have permission to use). Adsense expects it's publishers to "go the extra mile" and create their own unique contents, including images. If you can't create your own images to use with your text (websites and blogs need text, not JUST images or videos), then they expect you to get permission from the image owner BEFORE you use the images, and you'll need to give credit to the image owner. Images specifically marked as being in the public domain don't require permission for use, but you do still need to have a site with mostly original contents, so using a site full of public domain images and nothing else is likely to get a rejection.</li><li>- a website that isn't six months old and doesn't have six months worth of original content. Adsense requires sites from many countries to be six months old before getting approval, and although we don't have a list of specific countries to point to, it appears that there are many more countries AdSense has added this requirement for.</li></ol><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnJKbb7H_Hrxnoh16kznXfIFQugFgU47itiEKS0KyVuHuDCNf_mneuhof4LP2qwAqWXw53cUNVg3cSXvMx3WJ2nJEb5TgTub9Yk2cTbhHNE66KX7awEIwh9-UoHBFzxXf-WyC8W2Y6LPc/s1600/ohohstickgirl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnJKbb7H_Hrxnoh16kznXfIFQugFgU47itiEKS0KyVuHuDCNf_mneuhof4LP2qwAqWXw53cUNVg3cSXvMx3WJ2nJEb5TgTub9Yk2cTbhHNE66KX7awEIwh9-UoHBFzxXf-WyC8W2Y6LPc/s200/ohohstickgirl.jpg" width="117" /></a></div>While there may still be other reasons for unacceptable content, these are the most common ones we've come across. It's up to each publisher to ensure their content follows the guidelines and policies set out by AdSense and Webmaster Guidelines so if you receive this rejection, you'll need to spend some time going through your website or blog and digging through your content to find the areas you'll need to amend, remove, or add to. If you have taken the time to study your site and the policies and still can't figure out what's wrong, then you can ask in the <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdSense?hl=en">AdSense Help Forum</a> to see if someone else can see the issues at hand, but it's really the publisher's responsibility to at least try to figure out the problems first. Help is always available, but learning how to decipher your site's problems will help you keep your account in good standing in the future.

AdSense's Unacceptable Content Rejection - What is it?

It seems like this is the question everyone's asking right now. There are more and more of these rejection questions showing up in the ...

October 06, 2010

Copied Content Syndrome (Or Why I Got Disabled/Rejected for Adsense)

In the last few weeks we've seen an increasing number of AdSense publishers in the forums with disabled accounts. While we see disabled publishers pretty often, the number of publishers being disabled for having blogs with no original content is increasing. AdSense has been cracking down on the copied content issue - or so it seems. So why is copied content an issue? COPYRIGHT <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWCA8T3P_kW8bjVPJvE5gaK_YXQq1jKOGHmJBsNFj4gEb0J30l8LULOyfm_lfGJ-jCrd_9UTveyBp29vSlTUCqb1Tp4vDJjmvWbbYeHIchm9xUZsTnDwCBqqiJRdkFeVKb6YNkMhO5pLA/s1600/originalstickgirlsmall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWCA8T3P_kW8bjVPJvE5gaK_YXQq1jKOGHmJBsNFj4gEb0J30l8LULOyfm_lfGJ-jCrd_9UTveyBp29vSlTUCqb1Tp4vDJjmvWbbYeHIchm9xUZsTnDwCBqqiJRdkFeVKb6YNkMhO5pLA/s320/originalstickgirlsmall.jpg" width="285" /></a></div>There is of course the obvious reason; content copied from other authors and bloggers is copyright content. If the blogger or author has not given permission, and has not licensed their article using the Creative Commons designation, then the author has every right to expect exclusive rights to their work. That means you can't just borrow or re-use, re-purpose or redistribute the work that someone else has done. Authors discovering their work on someone else's blog will find it necessary to file a DMCA complaint, and this entails work for the author as well as investigation on the part of AdSense (or Blogger) staff. It's time that shouldn't have to be spent when bloggers and webmasters respect each other's creative work. For the author who writes their own original work, it means that they may be subject to having their AdSense account disabled because of duplicated work - in other words, even though they've written their own articles if others have copied their article to hundreds of different places, they may face disablement due to someone else's behaviour. Generally, if an author can prove their work was original they'll have a decent chance of retaining their account, but it causes a great deal of trouble for the authors of original work to have their work copied. From the <a href="http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=48182">AdSense Program Policies</a> (which all publishers must adhere to) we have this excerpt: AdSense publishers may not display Google ads on webpages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content. Please see our <a href="http://www.google.com/adsense_dmca.html">DMCA policy</a> for more information. <div style="color: #3d85c6;">PLAGIARISM</div> When  you use someone else's work without giving that author credit for the work, that's considered plagiarism. Although you may not directly place your own copyright or name name on the work, omitting the credit for the original author is seen as taking credit for the work yourself. Not only does this put you and your AdSense account at risk, it gives you no credibility at all in terms of knowledge or experience. If you have a blog full of articles about marketing, then you need to have marketing skills and experience to write about it. If you don't, and you are simply copying what someone else has written, how do you know the information you are providing to your readers is even correct?  As an example, I have seen many blogs written by AdSense publishers - some of those have little experience with AdSense, or are new to AdSense and some of the "advice" they offer is not only wrong, it can get a publisher disabled. <div style="color: #3d85c6;">ADSENSE POLICY</div> Regardless of the foregoing, AdSense sets the rules for the type of content they want to see in a publishers blog. By that, I don't mean they'll tell you what you can write about - that's up to you, but they do get to choose based on content whether or not a publsiher even gets approval for an AdSense account. AdSense expects it's publishers to work for their income - nobody gets money for nothing in today's world. They look for original work - whether it's articles, artwork, photos or other types of information, they want their publisher's to add something original to the internet, rather than just regurgitating someone else's work. They want your own unique thoughts and articles - and most likely, so will your readers and visitors appreciate a thoughtful article you've written yourself over some canned article from an article catalog. One of the items in the AdSense Program Policies is a link to the Webmaster Guidelines - publishers must also adhere to these, and AdSense expects publishers to read them, and follow their suggestions. An excerpt from those guidelines: Scraped content: Some webmasters make use of content taken from other, more reputable sites on the assumption that increasing the volume of web pages with random, irrelevant content is a good long-term strategy. Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not provide any added value to your users without additional useful services or content provided by your site. It's worthwhile to take the time to create original content that sets your site apart. This will keep your visitors coming back and will provide useful search results.  This doesn't mean that you can't use an article, or a part of an article as a reference in your own written work (as I've done here by quoting the guidelines directly), it means you can't simply "scrape" the content from other sites and expect AdSense to accept that. Using a paragraph from someone else's article (with references & authorization) is an acceptable method of including content you'd like to highlight or discuss from other sites. Just don't make your entire blog from non-original work. <div style="color: #3d85c6;">REJECTIONS FOR CONTENT</div> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnksjuunSCZJih73Yo9VG0rYXss-d4RwMd9du_bZQZtVcBN0kO_tROj7wLIuH-4nnJXWPdpYBSYBv3JOvTFOFKZAaXabmuGknzuM-52o5VYyoPK87L7F9WqutcjVPR4bhkqT7YPjdFSI0/s1600/CopiedContentBustSmall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnksjuunSCZJih73Yo9VG0rYXss-d4RwMd9du_bZQZtVcBN0kO_tROj7wLIuH-4nnJXWPdpYBSYBv3JOvTFOFKZAaXabmuGknzuM-52o5VYyoPK87L7F9WqutcjVPR4bhkqT7YPjdFSI0/s320/CopiedContentBustSmall.jpg" width="320" /></a>Besides the active publishers being disabled for copied content, we are seeing more and more rejections from AdSense for sites that appear to have no original work. For those of us who write original articles, we can only see this as a good thing. It means that AdSense is beginning to value originality...or more likely that the AdWords advertisers (they pay the bills, so they do have a say) are beginning to demand their ads not appear on sites will a lot of copied stuff. But whatever the reason, AdSense is rejecting applications more frequently for sites whose contents are nothing more than articles copied from other sites. If you are having a problem getting an AdSense application accepted and you are submitting a site that you've filled up with work that you didn't create then you might try writing a blog full of your own articles, and submitting that instead. <div style="color: #3d85c6;">References:</div> <a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769">Webmaster Guidelines</a> <a href="http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=48182">AdSense Program Policies</a>

Copied Content Syndrome (Or Why I Got Disabled/Rejected for Adsense)

In the last few weeks we've seen an increasing number of AdSense publishers in the forums with disabled accounts. While we see disabled ...

July 22, 2010