Google Adsense

H

Hare

Senior Member
If this is the wrong place for this, I apologize. 

I want to put an ad on my site through Adsence. The site in question is a livestock browser game. It is about 2 years into development and usually has 4-10 people online at a time. Almost everything on it is in PHP.

My application was denied due to 'lack of content.' Is this because of the fact that about 95%+ of our content is stored in the dtabase (even our informational guides)?

Or is it because you have to be logged in to view it? (or both)?

Our players wanted to add a wiki, which I was considering doing through wikia.  I'm not clear on whether that would suffice for Adsense. 

Does anyone have any suggestions for making my site have more content? I was thinking of creating a bunch of educational resources (HTML pages that are linked from the home page with no required login) on livestock to provide enough content for adsense. Would this do the trick?

 
The first thing that comes to mind is that your being denied because Adsense cannot see the member or login protected pages. You should only protect member specific pages. If you have any lore or non login required pages that are protected, opening those up may help.

 
Thank you two very much! I'm working on adding public resources to the site with plenty of textual content. I'm also rethinking the educational/tutorial pages since I think Matthew is right about making sure it makes sense with the game. With that in mind, I added an educational resources on genetics, which are coded realisticly into the game for our breeding system. So it is both useful for real-life and in-game application (and even recommends guests sign up to learn more genetics by playing the game). Will see what else I can come up with. 

 
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I wanted to follow up and see if you had seen any improvement or if you had finally gotten approved for Google Adsense.

 
I'm still working on the content and haven't attempted to reapply, but so far it's coming along! 

I updated our home page with more info about the game.

I also removed the navigation links from the top of our home page for when people are not logged in. Since all the links are to places where login is required, I figured there wasn't much point... (they still show if you login, though). Instead, I was thinking of putting up new links to things that visitors can use, which the google bots can crawl over.

One of those links will be to a comprehensive genetics guide, which I finished making. I'm waiting to finish a few more content pages before adding the links, though. The other one I just got started on is an art tutorial for drawing rabbits that (like the genetics page) uses images from the game and premotes signing up.

I'll need to come up with a few more ideas for content that is appealing to visitors and premotes the game in a relevant way. 

 
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I've actually been having the same issue as this, I've been denied twice for "insufficient content" on HP because you can't provide login details until AFTER you've been accepted. We have our forum (with over 5 years worth of topics and posts on it) and our help pages open to the public, and still denied. I'm kind of at a loss for what else to do, but I've thought about making animal pages open to the public.

I know lots of games use adsense, so I know it's possible, I'm just not sure how they got approved. I would love to know how you do it, if you get accepted! And I'll do the same if I do, haha.

Sorry for kind of hijack your topic, haha. But I figured since it was the exact same issue, I'd add here rather than make a new one :P.

 
When I applied for AdSense Animal Acres was denied for lack of content as well. But I applied later with Eliyo and got in with no issues. Eliyo has a lot more pages open publicly but there are still a lot of closed pages too. Links are also fully accessible for non logged in user, it just takes you to the login page. Open pages include the guides (which there are a handful), news, the first level forums, the explore area overview and battle arena overview, terms of service, staff and contact pages. I think that's it. Not sure if that helps but I do think having the guides especially was a good bit of content.

 
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Instead of adding public content, provide Googlebot with credentials to log in. You will have to do that anyway if you're going to show ads on login protected pages.

 
That's kind of weird. I believe they asked for credentials on the application stage a few years ago. They also asked for verification through Google Webmaster tools to prove that you're an owner, but not for an approved AdSense application. That would be funny if they don't verify the restricted content anymore. Just thinking of their own security, what if I have a nice public facade with kitten photos and post porn videos or drug formulas behind the login? Google will never know about that if I don't give their crawler a way to access those pages, and I don't have to do this if my account is verified already.

Anyway sorry for the misinformation. I didn't keep a track of all the changes that Google introduced recently. 

 
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Well, I finally got approved and put Adsense up. I made it guest-only (will not show when logged in) because it seems to cause longer page loads and I don't think I'd get as many clicks from the smaller group of people who log in anyway. Not worth bogging down the site for them.

Most of the clicks will probably come from visitors, but I have no idea, this is my first time using Adsense...

Strangely, it doesn't show any ads on Mobile. Might be my site's lack of mobile viewport or something (I was testing with debugger earlier).

Edit: Nevermind, they won't show up at all anymore. Oh well.

 
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Hare said:
Strangely, it doesn't show any ads on Mobile. Might be my site's lack of mobile viewport or something (I was testing with debugger earlier).

Edit: Nevermind, they won't show up at all anymore. Oh well.
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It can take a day or two for ads to show up consistently. Adsense is notorious for taking forever to propagate changes across their infrastructure.

 
Thanks, I've been trying to get my general art site approved, and all this info helped a lot.  Still waiting for an answer.  This will be helpful for when I do actually put out a game too.

 
Just noting that I got approved this morning! So, for anyone else needing help, this is what I did:

1. I made sure my SSL stuff was in order. I don't know if this actually helped, but I heard from a few people that it does, so I figured I needed to get it done anyway.

2. I made all of HP's help pages available to the public, as well as our information pages about horse and dog breeds, and I made sure they were linked in the header. Our forum was already public.

3. I made sure that there was nowhere for the crawler to get lost. So we had a couple of headers going and I had a sneaking suspicion that the crawler was landing on the index page which was on it's own header, and then trying to find other pages with the same header and when it couldn't it said we didn't have enough content.

4. I got rid of our guest login because it was kind of weirdly coded and wouldn't automatically log you in (it would refresh the page and autofill the guest login) so I thought maybe that was causing it to get lost too.

I think the biggest help was the header, and the secondary one was linking information rich, text-heavy tutorials from the header. So I hope that helps someone else!

 
hurricaneviolet said:
Just noting that I got approved this morning! So, for anyone else needing help, this is what I did:

1. I made sure my SSL stuff was in order. I don't know if this actually helped, but I heard from a few people that it does, so I figured I needed to get it done anyway.

2. I made all of HP's help pages available to the public, as well as our information pages about horse and dog breeds, and I made sure they were linked in the header. Our forum was already public.

3. I made sure that there was nowhere for the crawler to get lost. So we had a couple of headers going and I had a sneaking suspicion that the crawler was landing on the index page which was on it's own header, and then trying to find other pages with the same header and when it couldn't it said we didn't have enough content.

4. I got rid of our guest login because it was kind of weirdly coded and wouldn't automatically log you in (it would refresh the page and autofill the guest login) so I thought maybe that was causing it to get lost too.

I think the biggest help was the header, and the secondary one was linking information rich, text-heavy tutorials from the header. So I hope that helps someone else!
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This is all great info, but what do you mean by linking from the header?  I'm not sure how that works.  

 
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