Many webmasters are struggling with getting approved for an AdSense account. I show you which things you need to consider to finally get approved. Make your website comply to the AdSense policy, apply for an AdSense account, verify your data and then make sure your account stays active and doesn’t get hacked!
1. Make your website comply to the AdSense policy
Your website needs to meet all criteria Google states in their policies for the AdSense program. I list the most important factors you need to consider below:
Enough content
Your site must be launched (no “under construction” sites) and have enough content on it. Google does not mention any required word counts, however, from my experience you should have at least 5 pages of high qualitative, unique content – each page having at least 500 words of text.
No forbidden content
Your site is not allowed to link to or include content related to:
Infringing copyrights, counterfeit goods, mature content, violence, hate speech, hacking, illegal drugs, selling endangered species and programs which pay for clicking ads/offers, surfing websites or reading emails.
Sites selling the following are also forbidden: alcohol, tobacco-related products, prescription drugs, weapons, and coursework/student essays.
Gambling content is completely forbidden in some countries. In other countries AdSense only restricts the placement of ads on gambling-related sites, e.g. in the UK and Spain.
Only allowed traffic sources
You are not allowed to promote your site by email spam, click-exchange programs or displaying ads in software applications.
Stop using other ad networks
If you are currently using other ad networks such as Chitika, you should remove all of their ads before applying to Google AdSense. Google wants to have the whole cake alone!
Buy your own domain
You should buy a premium domain, for example at Namecheap and not use a free domain or a subdomain of another website.
Supported Language
At the moment, only content in specific languages is allowed to participate in Google AdSense. You can check if your language is under them here.
6 months waiting period for some countries
For some countries, e.g. India and China, webmasters need to own their sites for at least 6 months. It is a bit discriminating, but you can’t do something against it. There was too much abuse coming from these countries and therefore they introduced this, in my opinion morally questionable, restriction.
Common site behavior
Webmasters need to make the site easy to navigate. This means your site should have a clean layout with a user-friendly navigation and be without unexpected redirects or downloads. It’s not a good idea to try to revolutionize the internet by building a fancy navigation no one can understand.
Contact Us/Disclaimer/Privacy Policy page
Your site needs to have a page where users can contact you, a disclaimer and a privacy policy page.
The contact us page is easy to create for everyone, but most of us are no lawyers who are able to write a disclaimer and a privacy policy. Fortunately, there is a WordPress plugin that uses a template for these writings and inserts the data from your website, e.g. the URL and site name automatically.
This free plugin is called WP-Insert. Install the plugin, click “Setup legal pages”, assign a page labelled Disclaimer and one labelled Privacy Policy. Put the corresponding links on your website in a place where they are visible (most sites put them in the navigation or in the footer). Done.
Adhere to the Webmaster Quality Guidelines
The webmaster quality guidelines give hints on what Google likes and what not. The most important factors are that you provide unique, relevant content, not try to trick users and write for the users, not only for SEO. You should check the webmaster quality guidelines in detail.
2. Apply for an AdSense Account
You can sign up for an AdSense account here.
Choose your Google account or register a new one if you don’t have one yet. There are no costs involved!
In the next step, you have to enter the URL of the website you want to monetize with AdSense. Choose the language of your content and click “Continue”.
Fill out all fields in the next part of the application. The most important thing is that you provide your real data. You are required to verify your mailing address. Therefore, you have to use an existing address. Google will send you a letter with a code that is needed for verification. After filling out the form, press “Submit my application” and be patient to wait for a few days.
If you adhered to everything I wrote above, your account should be approved soon. However, at this point the approval is only temporary while Google checks your traffic. Place the ads on your website. Make sure you are not clicking on them and that you don’t send any suspicious traffic to the site.
3. Verify your AdSense account
Once you got accepted you will have to verify your address, bank account and perhaps your phone number.
The phone verification is not necessary for everybody. I didn’t need to do it. If Google forces you to do it, simply put your phone number in the AdSense account and click “Verify phone”. A robot will call you telling you a five-digit number you have to write in a field in your account.
It will take Google between one and four weeks to send you a letter to your home for address verification. All further instructions will be on the letter. Basically, you just have to type in a pin code in your AdSense account.
You need to verify your bank account for receiving payments. Google will sent a small amount to your bank account, usually between $0.15 and $1.15. This takes about five business days. Check your bank records and look for a deposit from Google Inc. or AFS (a Google partner). You have to write the exact amount they sent in a field in the billing settings of your AdSense account. They need to know that your bank account really exists and you have access to it.
If you followed all the advice above, you will have your fully verified AdSense account in a few weeks.
After all the hard work you don’t want to lose your account, right? Make sure you are not getting banned and that no one hacks into your AdSense account!
4. Keep your AdSense Account active
Prevent that your AdSense account gets disabled for violating the policy. I created a list of 15 reasons why AdSense accounts get banned and how you can prevent a ban. I also show you what to do when your AdSense account already got disabled.
5. Protect your AdSense Account from Hackers
Once you have some sort of success with AdSense, competitors will try to ruin your success. They will try to hack into your account or abuse your ad code until you get banned. Prevent this from happening with my tutorial on how to protect your Google AdSense account.
