Your website must be your own top-level domain (www.example.com and not www.example.com/mysite)

Good luck getting Google to drop Blogspot

Your domain must have been registered and active for at least 6 months before you apply for AdSense

That's money left at the table, many quality sites are few months old.

- Your last 2 points I think are already in the program policy, it's more of a matter of enforcement of existing rules than new ones.

Here's one that's more doable:

The Search engine division (few meters walk from the AdSense team) already have a pretty good code that can differentiate between quality sites and scraped content or made for affiliates or MFA crap, just use what you've got on both new applicants and current publishers playing the bait and switch game.

I don't think I can possibly be adding anything new here, they know what they have, and know how to clean up, also how muck it could cost them, quality enforcement is technically easier for Google than any other company, what's not there is the executive decision and acceptance of the price to pay.

Those are not my requirements, not mine at all.

That is what Google sends out in the rejection email they send to these applicants. It is Google who is telling the applicants that they want to see these things.

I see a lot of rejected-from-Adsense posts in Yahoo Answers, mostly from Indian users. One sent me the exact email he got from Adsense containing the above requirements

These requirements do not seem to be particularly difficult. Other than the 6 months, which just takes time and patience to wait, they present no problems.

Google has been trying to clean things up. The flip side of tossing out bad publishers who violate the terms of service is checking on the new sites coming into the system, so the bad actors dont just re-register under a new name.

It all makes good sense to me.

> Those are not my requirements

My bad, I skip read nowadays, glad some of the crap is stopped at the door, the point about cleaning up via more enforcement and using what they have remains valid.

6 months old to get in now ha?
Interesting.

That is what Google sends out in the rejection email they send to these applicants.

Sounds good to me, although the "6 months" requirement doesn't do anything to keep people with existing accounts from cranking out junk sites on new domains.

This is great news, these requirements are really the bare minimum any decent quality web site should meet anyway. And 6 months is just about the right length of time to focus on creating a good site before obsessing over clicks per day and what not.

The association of Adsense with spammy, low quality sites is a real threat to the viability of the content network and in the end, a downward pressure on the average EPC for us all.

The problem isn't the quality of the site a publisher uses to get accepted, it's the subsequent sites. Google should review all sites.

Google should review all sites.

That wouldn't be a panacea, because if Joe Publisher couldn't use his AdSense code on a newsite.com domain, he could just publish the pages at existingsite.com/worthless/.

That wouldn't be a panacea, because if Joe Publisher couldn't use his AdSense code on a newsite.com domain, he could just publish the pages at existingsite.com/worthless/.

It wouldn't be a cure all, however, it would be a good start.

It wouldn't be a cure all, however, it would be a good start.

Some might call it "lipstick on a pig." :-)

It would be a good start if (and only if) they were equally zealous about throwing out publishers whose pages weren't up to snuff.

doesn't do anything to keep people with existing accounts from cranking out junk sites on new domains.

It does when they get caught ;)

I can understand it, that way they can screen out the dross

Your website must be your own top-level domain

So why are you offered the option of putting Adsense on Blogger?

Hello right hand, meet left hand!

So why are you offered the option of putting Adsense on Blogger?

I use a top-level domain name with my blogger account. Before I did, I was using a subdomain from blogger.

A sub-domain is considered its own separate domain by Google with "loose" ties to the main domain.

So in either case, it is not the "sub-directory" option they appear to frown upon in the warning above.

Hate to throw cold water on the premise of the thread but my daughter just created her first site a month ago and was instantly accepted into AdSense.

No top level domain initially, she has one now, was registered only days before acceptance, and it's a pure affiliate play, nothing terribly original whatsoever.

It's always possible that the rules are invoked only when necessary--e.g., to avoid saying "Your site is trash, or 90 percent of your traffic comes from Outer Widgetstan, so we're not accepting you." Not unlike "Thanks for submitting your manuscript, but it doesn't fit our current editorial needs" or "Thanks for applying for employment at Widget Corporation, but we aren't actively recruiting right now."

-- Some might call it "lipstick on a pig." +6 month --

And someone might call it "pig on the lipstick" which kind of content-plates more (Ad)Sense, to begin with...

...., how is your long tail doing these days?

signor_john ... This is what I suspect as well.

I've seen some of these sites that have been rejected by Adsense (one even applied 5 times, and every single time rejected) and they are mostly blogs with poorly written and no original content.

I guess it is Google's polite way of saying that their sites do not pass their criteria right now.

I think though that this is a huge step that Adsense is now more picky when accepting sites. While the policy can't stop all those worthless MFA sites, but at least they can stop some at the gate

And like incrediBill, I also know of some publishers who have been easily accepted into Adsense despite having newly launched websites/blogs

If you can't find a way to get accepted to adsense, you should find another line of work. It is not exactly a prestigious network :)

Mfishy, AdSense was never intended to be a "prestigious network." It was a "populist network" from the beginning. But that doesn't mean Google may not be tightening up the admission standards a bit, especially now that the war for market share has been won.

For that matter, Google may be happy to purge the ranks, too (as it has done with advertisers), by using starvation rather than a guillotine.

I think G is just trying to maintain the balance between advertisers and publishers.

if advertisers are ready to spend $100 and there are 500 publishers its going to disappoint established publishers, hence I guess google will follow 2 level cleaning formula

1 - Don't take new publishers
2 - Throw out the junk guys

hence in the coming months we will see more and more pubs getting banned from adsense.

blame the economic conditions.

regards,
Jaunty

even if you do get accepted, i say to find ways to cut the middleman and get some cpm on the left side of the decimal point for a change.

- Your website must be your own top-level domain (www.example.com and not www.example.com/mysite).
- Your domain must have been registered and active for at least 6 months before you apply for AdSense.
- You must provide accurate personal information with your application that matches the information on your domain registration.
- Your website must contain substantial, original content

Do you guys know when they started tightening the application process? Before Adsense seems to be accepting publishers left and right and it was so easy to get into Adsense.

What happens is when they do deny someone they just post that message as a general statement since most everyone that applies can't follow those 4 rules. Doesn't mean they are strict rules, it's just less time-consuming to post exact reasons. I'm sure if your site follows all 4 rules they would make it in, which is very easy to do ignoring the 6 month wait rule.

even if you do get accepted, i say to find ways to cut the middleman and get some cpm on the left side of the decimal point for a change.

You're missing the point of what AdSense is--or what its strength is. The etrength of AdSense (and the benefit to publishers) is the network's ability to match targeted ads on lots of different subtopics to lots of different pages.

Just as important, AdSense doesn't have to be your only source of ad revenue. Look at major media sites, and you'll often see a combination of display ads and AdSense ads. Each type of ad serves a different purpose and a different market.

I think this might be related to the e-mail many got a month back. It assured existing pubs that times were tough but G was looking out for them, wasn't going to dump them and not to give up on G yet (even though revenues have been dropping weekly.) I think they're taking this economic slow-down time as an opportunity to eliminate the chaff that has been out there taking all the revenue from decent pubs they want and at the same time making the adwords clients happier by more targeted traffic.