Rebrand Part III: Dealing With AdSense Problems

It’s been a few weeks since I changed the name of the blog and updated the domain name. As part of updating the domain, I added the new domain as a new site in my Google AdSense.

Unexpectedly, this kicked off a review of my site, and, on Wednesday, August 21, 2019, at 4:58 am, I received the following message from the AdSense team:

Subject: You need to fix some issues before your site is ready for AdSense

Thanks for submitting your site “joehxblog.com” for AdSense.

The team has now reviewed it but unfortunately your site isn’t ready to show ads at this time. There are some issues which need fixing before your site is ready to show ads.

The email didn’t say what was wrong, so I logged into my AdSense account and took a peek at the sites section.

Selecting the sites section from the AdSense sidebar.

I didn’t write down exactly what it said, but it was something vague like “Your site has policy violations.”

Sucks that I don’t know exactly what they found wrong, so I felt this was a good time to review the AdSense program policies.

I’m 99% percent sure I don’t have any prohibited content (I barely even cuss on my blog) and since it’s the same site, just a new URL, I’m sure I fit the Webmaster quality guidelines .

I did find two potential issues, though:

I didn’t link to my privacy policy on every page. On mobile, I might have had a site layout that pushes content below the fold.

I modified my site code to show a link to the privacy policy at the top of every page. I also made it so that that the sentence that contains the link is a bit more descriptive than just “check out my privacy policy!”

I also updated my privacy policy to more clearly state my connection with Google, as well to more match what Google wants in a privacy policy.

As far as “pushing content below the fold” on mobile, the ads would make my pages look like the following:

AdSense ad pushing content below the fold on mobile.

So while the name, tagline, and navigation links were above the fold, whatever article content was below the fold. “Below the fold” means not visible without scrolling - “the fold” comes from newspapers being folded.

To deal with the content-below-the-fold issue, I simply removed the ad. I now rely on Google AdSense Auto Ads. I’m a bit concerned that Auto Ads will break my self-imposed “one ad per page” rule, so we’ll see what I decide to do in the future.

The Google AdSense team must have liked what I did, because I resubmitted and receive the following email the next day on Thursday, August 22, 2019, at 1:21 pm:

Subject: Your site is now ready to serve ads on AdSense

Good news!

Your site “joehxblog.com” is now ready to show AdSense ads.