I am not sure what “ads.txt” pages are but too many redirects is easy to do if the canonical is not the last rule in the htaccess file or if mod_alias and mod_rewrite are used carelessly.

Thanks, Not. I'm referring to the pages that they require us to have if we're showing ads - that has the google/direct/reseller codes on them. I will check to see if there is something going on with mod_alias and mod_rewrite.

You've given me something to start with!

BTW -

It worked fine, everything displayed fine for about 24-48 hours.

you may have been seeing cached results if the browser you used had visited those pages previously. When making changes, be sure to clear your caches before checking results to be sure you see results of the changes and not cached copies from previous visits.

My confusion about the "ads.txt pages" is because ads.txt is a simple text (.txt) file that you upload to the root directory of your domain.

I find it odd that this is only showing up in response to ads.txt requests. Do your other site files live elsewhere, maybe involving a Content Delivery System (cloudflare or the like)? Do requests for other .txt files, notably robots.txt, not get this response?

When the message displays in the browser itself, it means that a series of 301/302 responses are being sent out, one after another. One part of the browser's job is to keep count of how many redirects result from a single request. If the total goes up beyond a certain number--determined by the browser, anything from 10 to 30--the browser stops asking and puts up the error message. (If the redirects were happening site-internally, it would end up as a 500-class error with a different type of error message; it wouldn't say anything about redirects, because this information isn't shared with the browser.)

Ask the “site guy” to have a closer look at the site's access logs to confirm that each ads.txt request leads to a long string of ads.txt requests, each receiving a 301/302 response.

And, of course, have another look at htaccess to make sure you're not redirecting in circles.

Your post makes it sound as if ads.txt is subject to a different redirect (I assume involving a RewriteRule) than all other pages. This, by itself, is odd.

Thanks much Lucy and Not. I am glad that they let people like me in here...

I am facepalming myself so hard right now because I suspect I created this problem. Somewhere in googleland before the current search console, they said to put both www.site.com and just site.com versions into the webmaster console. I put one in as a subdomain of the other. Stupidly.


So years later we get the earnings at risk message...only for one version of the site... so he redirects this in htaccess.

Robots.txt, does NOT resolve, either, and I know it used to.

Anyway...thanks again.
Best,
Eternally unshiny

It happens to just about everyone at some time or another, but mistakes are not really mistakes so long as you can learn from them.

Google still wants all versions of domains in the Search Console, but that is because they view each version as a separate website. If you can actually visit all those versions of each site, then you can have misunderstandings with Google. They may see the same contents at http://example.com and https://example.com/ and also at https://www.example.com and consider them to be duplicate content. In addition, you may see the same content at https://example.com/ and at https://example.com/index.html - more confusion.

Of course you can add a canonical meta tag for every page, but since there is a cleaner and simpler way to make sure that you only have one set of official URLs for your domains, it is the preferred way to handle those "copies" of your domain.

This is the AdSense forum so it would be off topic to get into details here, but if your domain is hosted on Apache server you should read about canonical rewrites via htaccess in our Apache forum [webmasterworld.com] and learn to make sure that you only have one version of your domain available. That way, no one is linking to the great content on a different version of your site.

One very old discussion in the Apache forum can give you a good understanding of what, why and how so you have something to compare with what you are doing - it is part of the Apache forum Library: [webmasterworld.com...]

Thanks so much, Not!