My blog is approved for AdSense! – Google Wants 20 Articles
I am excited to share with you the good news that my AdSense application for this blog has been approved. It was approved on June 13, 2024. You might be wondering why I’m so excited if you have read about my previous journey with AdSense. It tells you that I already have an AdSense account. This is actually my third journey to AdSense approval. The first AdSense account was for my prayer group. The second one was for my business. It is the one this blog is connected to. However, I’m referring to the first AdSense account when I refer to previous AdSense account in this blog post.
Well, when my AdSense account got approved exactly 9 years ago this month, things were different. At the time, once your AdSense account got approved, you could just add any other website to it. Google did not verify the additional websites. It was how I added by blog to my AdSense account. As a note, I was running this blog on blogger. Also, the process of adding blogger blogs to AdSense accounts was pretty straight forward: just change one or two settings on blogger and AdSense and you are good to go.
At a point, I abandoned the blog. About a year ago, I decided to revive and rebrand the blog, and that is where the problem started. For one, the blog had been disconnected from AdSense, and Google required it to be verified. Secondly, after following the steps to reconnect the blog to AdSense, it returned an error that the ads.txt file could not be found. When I searched the web, I found that several other people were facing the same challenge. There seemed to be no solution to the problem. I followed different recommendations (most of which were basically variations of the same proposed solution, which was how to upload and test the ads.txt file) but nothing worked. I had uploaded the ads.txt file several times and confirmed that it was accessible but AdSense still reported that the file could not be found. After returning to the problem several times for nearly a year, I finally decided to relocate the blog to a dedicated domain, this domain.
I rebranded from “How to Make Money Online” to “The Citizen Alert”, shifting focus from making money to informing the general public. However, I was to face further disappointment because I faced the exact same problem that caused me to relocate the blog. Google kept telling me that the ads.txt file could not be found, but I was more than 100% sure that the file existed and was accessible. At this point, I sensed that something else must be causing the problem.
I started to reflect back to try to locate the problem. I remembered that I had deleted many of my old blog posts because they we no longer relevant. At the end, there were only 9 blog posts left. I also remembered that when I first applied for AdSense, my account only got approved when I had 20 articles on the website. So I decided to add more articles to reach the 20. Along the way, I kept trying, after every few articles I added, but kept being rejected. On June 7, 2024, I added the 20th article (I also added “About the blogger” and “About the author” pages which were missing) and submitted the site for review again. Then 6 days later, on June 13, 2024, I got the good news of the approval of the blog.
From this journey, it is obvious that Google is looking out for at least 20 articles on a blog, all other things in place, to approve it. There you have it. I hope you’ve learnt something from my experience.