@jojy - Maybe you didn't pass. Maybe there's something on your page(s) that doesn't meet the standards (whatever that is.)

I think I have a similar problem. Pages which are not frequently visited are no longer showing ads at all. So I wonder if, beside the brand safety algorithm, may be now Adsense is displaying ads only on pages which are meeting a given threshold of visitors / days (or weeks).

Example 1:
- I create a brand "new" page
- I visit it myself (first ever visit)
- No ads are showing (brand safety)
- Within the next hour, the Adsense's bot will visit the page
- When I visit the page again, this time there are ads

Example 2:
- I visit an "old" page
- No ads are showing, still brand safety, because this page was not visited since a while
- In spite of visiting the page, Adsense's bot NEVER came (at least during the whlole week, this is an experimentation on going)
- Ads are still not showing
- I asked friends around the World to visit this page, only once
- Same, no trace of Adsense's bot.

Within the week, this page was visited 5 times, and Adsense's bot never ever come, and therefor , ads are not showing.

So my theory is that:
- new pages (pages that Adsense has never known about in the past), are visited within an hour following the first visit.
- old pages, require a given number of view per days or week, before Adsense's bot check them

So, in this model only active pages, can expect to display ads, while old pages, which are only visited once in a while, no more. The problem is that, old pages, doesn't mean they are no longer interesting! Some people are still looking for the information they content. Within this scheme, I have 500.000+ "old pages" which are never being visited by the Adsense's bot again, not displaying ads, but, they still represent 4 millions views per month ! So imagine the loss of income that it represents.

keyplyr +

Thats what I basically did to get my pages ads to showup, the issue is you will have to keep crawling your old pages as well

because all the older pages show blank spaces, this hurts revenue becuase say someone searches in google finds an older article and they dont see any ads, that is a lost possibility, before ads would just appear now they are removing ads from pages that havent been visited in weeks or months even years, it sucks

Youtube is the only place where you can really make money off traffic now since they leave ads on older videos and people are more likely to click ads playing on a video than on a blog.

I wonder why they would do this.

Dimitri

That is exactly what I noticed every thing described about visiting a page and the ads showing up shortly after or an hour after.

This sucks, What is brand safety algorithm if thats it that sucks because it hurts my revenue, im getting very little as is now I lost all the European adsense clicks, because now with that EU law thing the ads show up blank with an approval to ask the Euro visitor if its okay for show ads lol

I used to get most of my ad clicks from Europe I had an article I posted on twitter it got 3000 visits mostly from Euro and then I checked my adsense and only 3 clicks all from USA, Id usually get at least 50 to 100 clicks on ads per 3000 visits now it seems you cant make money from adsense in Europe anymore because people are not going to click the show me ads thing.

Thats what I basically did to get my pages ads to showup, the issue is you will have to keep crawling your old pages as well

Broaster - Some pages, yes. You need to request your page a few times every couple weeks with Chrome. I sometimes use a VPN also.

@Dimitri That's exactly issue I have in my site. I have started using passback tags and now I am seeing over 80% impressions increase in my other ad network. That's huge number for me!

@keyplyr It does not make any sense to crawl your own pages and waste your server resources, bandwidth, etc. just with this hope Adsense bot will crawl pages and you may get few cents from Adsense.

I don't know why Google is making so harder our lives.

@broaster

because now with that EU law thing the ads show up blank with an approval to ask the Euro visitor if its okay for show ads lol

Why is that? GDPR only requires explicit consent for personalized ads. Switch your ad serving in Adsense to non-personalized, then add a user consent for the cookies. Ads can then be shown. If you want to track explicit consent then you can ask for consent to serve personalized ads from that point forward.

@Dimitri
What you describe sounds spurious.When you visit a page and it is not in the AdSense (MediaPartners Google) index, then the bot is sent to the page. This is how it has always worked. The fact that it is not working on your website might suggest an issue with the bot being able to access the pages. Have you checked AdSense for any reports of crawl errors. What about your logs (access/error)? Another issue to consider, do you have session params or other elements in your url that may cause each request of the page to go to a unique url. If yes, then those pages will never get indexed and ads will never show.

@Keyplyr / Broaster
Crawling your own website should work in theory and may be feasible for a smaller site, but generally smaller sites are not impacted to the same degree as larger sites. If one has a sites with millions of potential pages/urls then crawling becomes unfeasible because by the time you finished crawling all the pages you'll end up needing to start all over again because the TTL in inthe AdSense index will have elapsed. And it is difficult to predict which pages need to be prioritized (Remember popular pages are not impacted, so which one page out of a million that get no traffic will get requested next?). Finally there is always the risk that Adsense bans your account for artificially inflating impressions. If you crawling at scale you will frequently land on pages that already have ads showing, so unless you code some elaborate system to check your logs before hitting a page you will run the risk.

Well my 700 page site is displaying all ads now. There was about 5 or 6 weeks where about 30 to 50 pages were intermittent. Hit them with Chrome desktop a few times and the ads returned and stayed, but 2 or 3 pages keep loosing the ads.

My older 2 sites with registered trademark and publishing Adsense since 2003, never did loos any ads.

Well my 700 page site is displaying all ads now.

What does "now" mean? With a TTL of about 2 weeks you will have to go back to those pages every two weeks to be sure they remain in the index. For 700 pages that is done in a few minutes so its no big deal. But when you have tens of millions pages you likely wont complete requesting the pages in your first go before needing to start over.

...you will have to go back to those pages every two weeks to be sure they remain in the index.

No, the ads have continued to display without issue on that site. Another site still has a couple pages with the missing ad issue, but hitting them with Chrome fixes it for a couple weeks. No big deal.

But when you have tens of millions pages you likely wont complete requesting the pages in your first go before needing to start over.

You keep saying that. I don't have " tens of millions pages." If you do, then you'll need to find an alternate resolution. But just because you haven't resolved your issue, does not mean others haven't resolved theirs.


[fix typo]

[edited by: keyplyr at 1:47 am (utc) on Jul 10, 2018]

Which is strange, because the "Brand Safety" was, when I was impacted, not showing ads for any page that was not in the index which meant about 2 weeks. Now it is possible that they have changed things in the mean time, or it is more likely IMO that you were impacted by something else. But like all things AdSense it is really difficult to know for sure.

I would like to point out that a site that I am involved with is still impacted by "Brand Safety" and has no change since December. The only thing that is certain is that not all sites are treated equal.

@NickMNS

Have you checked AdSense for any reports of crawl errors.

No error.

What about your logs (access/error)?

No error in my logs either, no request blocked (I log them too), no PHP error too.

Another issue to consider, do you have session params or other elements in your url that may cause each request of the page to go to a unique url.

No, I never used parameters in URLs. And these old pages, are processed exactly the same than the new ones. No difference.

All Google's tools are working with these pages too. I can fetch them as Googlebot. The preview for both desktop and mobile is working perfectly. Same for pagespeed.

Adsense is implemented exactly the same way on the old and new pages (same template, same CMS). Also, the adsense code "works", since it shows my backup ads on these old pages.

So I definitively (until I change my mind :)) believe that , beside the index and crawl thing, there is a matter of threshold of visits, before a page can show ads. May be similar to what they did with Youtube videos/channels. May be to combat all these sites which produced millions of pages with random sentences put together.

I am using cloudflare on my site so I have disabled that on my site for two weeks to see if there is any improvement. Big deal for me but that's the only thing left which I haven't done yet.

Is it possible that the Adsense' bot is just too limited to crawl and re-crawl pages over and over gain ? So it selects the most "interesting", and queues less important pages ?

We don't have much information about the Mediapartners-Google bot. It's been used for multiple purposes before, even indexing audio & video files.

The Brand Safety [bit.ly] concerns started shortly after GSC added the content about
The Initial Better Ads Standards [betterads.org]

Presumably, the reason a crawled page isn't validated for Brand Saftey to display ads indefinitely is because that page can be changed easily.

So am I right that 'old' pages don't show Adsense ads anymore till somehow visits that page and the visitor after that will see ads again? Than I'm screwed with a bulletin board where old pages are visited regulary but not often the same pages. Same problem for news websites with an archive, older pages won't show ads so they are useless when it comes to earnings? Will a passback-tag help if it's filled with something else than Adsense ads?

Thanks NickMNS for the heads up on the adsense setting

I checked and I changed it to non personalized every since that EU law thing went into effect I lost a ton of clicks from Europe especially uk

My earnings have been dismal, this brand safety thing hurts blogs big time because many times people find an older article in search that hasn't been visited in ages and no ads appear so you lost a potential ad revenue click

I wish Google never did this, it seems more and more the only way to make money is from youtube, I talked to several people who used to blog at a seminar for blogging and they said they earn absolutely nothing anymore from blogging they actually took a hit because they had to pay for server fees and domain names, while youtube they didn't have to host a video on their own server its free to host

He told me he was shocked that his daily earnings were anywhere from 200 to 400 dollars a day us, he puts 3 ads on his videos he stopped writing articles ever since and just focused on youtube and is able to make a good living off it.

It seems that way, before you could make a decent living blogging and writing articles not anymore.

I just read a news article about people posting reaction videos on youtube making six figure salaries, you would think that they would be punished for clickbait spam or copyright but they don't.

instead google punishes websites more, especially now with this blank ads on old pages that aren't visited you lose out on revenue.

Dimitri
its some type of adsense algo, they did it on purpose they used to show ads on every single page old or new the moment you visit now fresh published pages dont show ads for a couple of minutes to an hour at times

old pages that haven't been visited dont show ads at all so you MISS revenue

I earn diddly squat on adsense, back in 2010 I was able to earn an actual living making enough to survive off my adsense on my blog, now my ranking is shot, I rarely get any visits, and I earn nothing on adsense

I check my adsense and some days it says 200 page views with 0.1 cent earned

As I said Broaster, I think it's more complex than that, for "old" pages. Because, even when an old page is visited, a couple of times, no ads are showing at all, even if you wait for days after.

Don't get me wrong please. Relying on Adsense, Youtube or Facebook is killing yourself. You never know when they change rule or kick you out without giving you any reason. I made millions dollars (Yes, millions since Adsense launched) but now I am starting over again! I suggest focus on building your own products or start a SAAS business. I know not everyone can do this but most who got some funds spend your energy on a building passive income.

jojy
Thats amazing you made a million off adsnese that must have been pre 2012 before all the major algo penalties that silently get your site and they dont even tell you how to fix these.

Im pretty sure a lot of the money you made went to server fees, costs, and other investments.

What happened and why did you have to start over?

Im just a blogger I write about my favorite sport and I never thought of being a million just make enough to be able to do what I love, I was making like 35k a year and it was okay with me because I was enjoying what I did and I dont live lavish

But they completely wiped me out.

@Broaster, You are right. I had 12 full time employees and few servers. Everything was fine till late 2012 and then I was struggling to run site for next 4 years. Slowly I was firing staff and losing savings with this hope that the changes or improvements I am making on my website will work but nothing actually worked. Now, I only have one employee and site is hardly paying one employee salary!

I am now working full time for a company. I have stopped working on that site and focusing on building my own SAAS product.

I am experiencing blank ads today but after reading this thread, hopefully someone can confirm this is accurate.

I was messing around with my ads and kept refreshing the page to see changes. Suddenly the ads stopped showing. My index page is still fine, but that page is blank. I then go to an older article and ads are there. Are the ads on that page gone now because I refreshed too much? Or will they come back? Thanks!

jojy

thats sad news a lot of people lost revenues and people lost jobs because of the algo, I heard what happens is the ones who get reviewed by human reviewers will never be able to recover because the human rater happen at random to pick a site that doesn't look well to them and knock it in favor of others.

If you couldn't I probably will never be able to. I also lost my traffic around 2012 I wasnt making a million but like 25 to 30 grand a year, now I barely make a penny a day and no matter how hard I try I dont get any traffic for single keywords in my niche, im even in google news

starting over sucks I dont want to give up either. Now I have to work part time different jobs just to make ends meet but I still havent given up for some reason on my blog, even though I should but I am stubborn and still believe there is a chance to regain my traffic and earn a living off it

vanillaice

If ads are on your older page that means someone crawled it or visited it and they appear like 30 minutes or an hour later

its how it is now for blogs, new articles will not show an ad right away unless you are a huge money making traffic website google gives them first dibs, so no matter what say Time magazine has google ads, any new article they post will get ads automatically because they are top tier they get premium ads as well

lower level websites will have to suffer and wait 30 to an hour to see ads and it hurts their revenue especially when they dont show ads on older articles, so people who stumble across an old article are the first to see it in ages but see no ads, and you lost a potential ad click

It sucks but what can you do when Google controls the ads game no one else pays as well as google adsense

This is was people referrer as "Brand Safety". I don't think there was an official statement, but it appeared around mid December and all the polemics about publishers creating sites stuffed with "fake news" and clickbait content. The monetarization of "fake news" content caused a lot of talks, and also advertisers were upset at taking part of it. Some even stopped advertising at Adsense' publisher network. So to address this issue, there is this kind of page-per-page pre-approval, before Adsense's ads are served. So, the first time a page is accessed, Adsense will serve third part ad network ads at best, or blank/backup ads. Then, "sometimes" later, the Adsense bot will come fetch the page, and if it's okay, then the next visitors will see Adsense' ads. It doesn't seem to be only a one time check. Some (like myself), noticed that the process seems to repeat every 2 weeks. (it's sure that the content of a page can change over the time).

@Travis
I read this thread a while back as it was happening to me with blank adverts. This would often happen if I had updated the page (Not the content) I may have added something to the menu, or moved an advert to a different position, but the actual content remained the same.

My site is about 14 years old. HTML, not fixed width, it stretches out to fill the page when full screen. It was made for PC's not mobiles.

Recently I changed to https, so all the files had to be uploaded again. This reset the clock on the adverts. My income dropped further still.

My adverts did have an alternative advert. This would be a .jpg image that I made in case the first advert didn't load. I've done that for years and was easier for fixed sized adverts. When it came to responsive adverts, I used a much smaller jpg to make sure that it would fit in the space even if it didn't fill it completely. The thing is with this, the results as to how many times the alternative advert appeared as it is just a link and won't show up in the Adsense panel.

The other day I took screen grabs over a period of about 1.5 hours. I'd get, no adverts / advert at the top but no advert at the bottom / both adverts showing / alternative advert at the top, real advert at the bottom... and so on. Results would be different in other browsers.

As Travis described above, you place the ad code on a page with its own URL and then in your ad-unit setup in your AdSense account enter the URL. Then when there is no ad to show, the content of the URL will appear instead. You can place anything there, third party ad (eg: media.net ad-code, affiliate link, or links to other area of your own site or another site). This is setup up at the ad-unit level, so if you use multiple ad-units you will need to set the URL for each. Take note that ad will appear in the format of the AdSense ad unit, so an ad appearing in 300 x 250 ad-unit will be 300 x250 so be sure that the backup ad fits it's container. If the ad-units are responsive the backup ad must be too.

@NickMNS
After reading your comment at the time, I made some new responsive adverts. Where it says "If no ads are available" I chose "Show another URL"

So, if the first responsive advert didn't show, it would try to load the second Adsense responsive advert. These of course did show up in the Adsense panel and it was around 40% or so where it showed the back-up advert.

I have since replaced the original advert with a different advert instead (just a text message containing a link)

Are you allowed to have another Adsense advert as a back-up? I cannot find anything in writing to say either way. The only thing I can think of is that it may be seen as me trying to inflate the impressions. I'm not, and if Adsense was working properly then there wouldn't be a need for an alternative Adsense advert.

Im currently using Auto Ads where they place random ads without having to go into code.

@Broaster

The problem I found with them is that they all have a white background. My site has a black background, so they look out of place.

Is media.net any good as an option because Adsense is lacking

I signed up a while back because of a continual drop in earnings. I was not happy with the it works. I made a 728x90 advert and picked the colours I wanted.

What did they do?... give me really small adverts with really dark colours. This would change almost every time I reloaded the page. Rarely did it give me the site and colours I asked for.

What I did was, every time I saw a blank ad space, I used Chrome desktop browser, then Chrome mobile browser to load the page a couple times. That would attract the Mediapartners-Google bot (verified in my logs.) It would sometimes take a week for Adsense reindexing after that, but sometimes it only took a day or two. Eventually all the pages were indexed by Adsense to be in compliance with the new policies.

This by no means brings back higher earnings. That has been declining for years.

That's what I've been doing since I read your comment, and is also the main reason why I am writing this thread. The thing is, my earnings were still low. I was lucky to get 2 clicks a day from my main section. I couldn't understand why as I had been going through the section bit by bit. Sometimes I'll visit a page and the adverts were there, sometimes not. I would often bookmark the ones that didn't show and recheck later as well as in different browsers.

Today I was testing out another one of these Cookie Consent JavaScripts as the one I had been testing wouldn't work in Chrome (it does in Chromium though)

I made a test page. This was an original page, but renamed to something simple (1.html) Added the javascript and uploaded the file. I tested the page with Chrome, Firefox and IE7 - They all loaded the cookie consent as well as both adverts. I left it about 30 minutes and checked again. Confirmed that they were stable.

I then emailed a friend in the USA to take a look at the page. I wanted to know if he saw the cookie consent (sadly, he did) and asked if there were any adverts on there. (In case the cookie consent was blocking them) He said there wasn't any adverts, just the text that I have as an alternative.

It was a while before he got back to me, and when he did I said that if he goes back to that page there should be adverts and there were but clearly too late if it was a real visitor.

Surely if the bot had been to the page and decided that an advert can be shown, then why was in not being shown for him?

This is worse than having crappy adverts.

lame wolf

You are having the same issues, but how is your traffic? do you get 50 views a day or more?

I dont get much views a day so I figured maybe that is why.

But the ads dont show on new articles published until 30 minutes or more later.

No idea if it means anything, but I have never noticed the "blank ads" on my site. As soon as I publish an article ads are shown, likewise if I update a page. Not disputing anything just wondering why I don't see the same on my site...

Side Note: Anyone else getting bucket-loads of very scantily clad women dating site ads recently?

Maybe use passbacks ads for blanks. Will they show up if Adsense ads won't show up for the first impressions?

lame wolf

You are having the same issues, but how is your traffic? do you get 50 views a day or more?

I dont get much views a day so I figured maybe that is why.

But the ads dont show on new articles published until 30 minutes or more later.

@Broaster

Yes, mate. Over 1200 visitors a day (Used to get 18000)

No idea if it means anything, but I have never noticed the "blank ads" on my site. As soon as I publish an article ads are shown, likewise if I update a page. Not disputing anything just wondering why I don't see the same on my site...

Side Note: Anyone else getting bucket-loads of very scantily clad women dating site ads recently?

@N5needinput
I used to get adverts all the time, but the last few months things have changed. I am still getting them.

Maybe use passbacks ads for blanks. Will they show up if Adsense ads won't show up for the first impressions?

@Runfun

I don't know what passbacks ads, so I googled it. I see it's a DFP thing. I don't use that.