How to Fix AdSense “Low Value Content”

So you tried to apply for AdSense for your blog but your AdSense application was rejected with the dreaded “low value content” message and you’re left wondering what can be done, what can be corrected or changed to get your AdSense application approved.

The truth is that almost every publisher, particularly in recent times has had their AdSense application rejected multiple times before it was finally approved. But what did they do right or how were they able to navigate the turbulent waters of the AdSense team, if any to get their site approved?

In this post, I will be sharing some never-before-seen strategies on how best to get your AdSense application approved no matter how long you have been trying. While you must have read about some of them, the overall strategy in this post should help you get your AdSense account approved.

What Does AdSense Mean By Low Value Content?

The low value content rejection message by Google AdSense is triggered when the Google AdSense system believes that the content on your website are not valuable both to Google and its users. See it this way; you are a chef in a restaurant and your restaurant has been critiqued as low quality to people who matter the most (users). When this happens, Google feels it doesn’t make sense to approve monetization for your site since the quality of your content is subpar.

How to Fix AdSense “Low-Value Content”

Below is a list of well-outlined steps on how to fix AdSense low value content rejection message.

1. Choose a Professional Looking Theme/Template

It is not enough to slap just any blog and design together and start publishing if you would be applying for AdSense at some point on the blog. A major thing worthy of note with AdSense and how it works is that the company has a volume of “site raters” who decide whether or not websites should be approved or rejected based on certain key factors. Notable among these key factors are the basics or foundation of any good website which is Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT). The EAT principle will run through this post as it will tell, not only in the design of your blog or website but also in the quality of your articles and how they are crafted.

The goal of a professional theme is to establish Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT).

So it is important to choose a professional-looking theme or template as part of the many strategies for establishing Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT) for your blog. It’s the same way you visit a site and admire the professionalism that went into the design and its layout. Since a website’s layout says a lot about a first-time visit, creating a very good impression of your blog to AdSense’s website raters should be paramount. As an aside: be sure to choose not just a professional-looking template for your website but also one that loads pretty fast on desktop and mobile.

Does it mean all AdSense sites are human-verified? Certainly not. AdSense sites are verified by both bots and humans.

2. Choose a Marketable Niche

A marketable niche is a niche with lots of ready-advertisers, end of story. The bulk of the time, people who start their blogs around marketable niches often get approved pretty quickly while those who don’t struggle and take forever to get their websites approved. Don’t create a blog of “top ten things” and expect to get approved by AdSense. It just might not work. I have seen this way too often and bloggers in this category often complain of not getting approved even after 40-50 articles. Does it mean these types of content are bad? The answer is “no”. The challenge, however, is that ‘listicles’ are often regurgitated and appear spammy, often with no new information.

Think of your articles as answers or solutions to readers’ problems.

While you might want to target the more marketable niches as a strategy to getting AdSense approval more quickly, it is important to research and write content that are perceived as valuable and relevant to users. Think of your articles as answers or solutions to problems.

3. Get a Good Logo

Get a professional-looking logo if you’re applying for AdSense and believe me, this can’t be overemphasized enough. I know there are tons of “free logo maker” websites around and they are not bad, to be honest. But please, put in some work and get the general appeal of your website to look professional. I have gotten a couple of my websites approved with free logo makers out there. The most important thing to note is to have a theme color across your website and get your logo to match the color of your color themes. But how does a logo on a website affect “low-value content”? Remember, the goal and strategy is to get your EAT to go as high as it can and create impressions that matter to AdSense site raters.

PS: You don’t have to contract graphic designers to charge you an arm and a leg to get a good logo. You can use some free services and my personal favorite is https://logomakr.com.

4. Content Length vs Content Numbers

With AdSense, the question of “how many articles should I have before applying for AdSense” will always be in vogue and never run out. This is because there are no explicit instructions from AdSense on how many articles one should have or on the content length. The simple and most direct answer to the question is that “no one truly knows”. AdSense is an ad network that best works with content sites; meaning the more content you have, the easier AdSense will understand your site and know the type of ads to send your way. However, when it comes to content, a good rule of thumb with AdSense is to have articles with at least 500 words each and a minimum of 30 articles before applying for AdSense. This is only to be on the safer side of things.

While this is merely a “rule of thumb”, I have personally had one of my sites approved with AdSense with just 17 articles and another with 115 articles. You may not be lucky to get off with 17 articles so you want to make sure you have more than enough articles.

My suggestion to new bloggers is to not apply for AdSense in a hurry. I know most new bloggers love the idea of seeing ads across their site, truth is, it can always wait. Ads shouldn’t be the primary focus of new blogs and bloggers/publishers. Take some time to focus on adding quality articles to your blog rather than distract yourself with AdSense approval early on. In time, your blog will get approved and you will be able to focus on other aspects of your blog.

5. Have Your Core Pages Ready & Updated

Core pages are as important as your content. Without them, you can’t get approved for AdSense, just as without your content, your site can’t get approved for AdSense. Core pages are the foundation of any blog. Often pretty much overlooked and underestimated by bloggers, core web vital pages tell a lot about your website and give the AdSense team a feeling that your site is not set up in isolation. It tells them how you connect with your visitors, how you handle their privacy and more importantly, whether or not they can substitute the content of your blog for legal, financial or medical advise if you are covering any of such niches.

As such, you want to make sure your site has core pages such as:

1. About Us Page
2. Privacy Policy
3. Contact Us Page
4. Cookie Policy
5. Disclaimer (If you operate within the finance, insurance, health/medical, and legal niche).

It may look like overkill but endeavor to have core pages such as “About”, “Privacy”, Contact”, and a “Cookie Policy” page on your site before you apply for AdSense. The first three are REQUIRED, meaning you can’t do without them. And I recommend you have a “Cookie Policy” page and a GDPR notice. You can get these two by using a plugin in your WordPress repository.

A general mistake new bloggers make is that they use the default Privacy Policy page in the WordPress page draft and just publish in anticipation that AdSense will approve their site. Quite surprisingly, Google has a template of what your Privacy Policy should include, mention, and spell out. According to Google, your privacy policy page MUST INCLUDE the below information:

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user’s prior visits to your website or other websites.
• Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to your users based on their visits to your sites and/or other sites on the Internet.
• Users may opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Ads Settings. (Alternatively, you can direct users to opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies for personalized advertising by visiting www.aboutads.info.)

If you have not opted out of third-party ad serving, the cookies of other third-party vendors or ad networks may also be used to serve ads on your site, which should also be disclosed in your privacy policy in the following manner:

• Notify your site visitors of the third-party vendors and ad networks serving ads on your site.
• Provide links to the appropriate vendor and ad network websites.
• Inform your users that they may visit those websites to opt out of the use of cookies for personalized advertising (if the vendor or ad network offers this capability). Alternatively, you can direct users to opt out of some third-party vendors’ uses of cookies for personalized advertising by visiting www.aboutads.info.

You can see more of what Google expects of your Privacy Policy page by checking this link.

PS: A friend once had his AdSense application rejected constantly and he talked to me about it. I audited his site and found out his content were good. His core pages, however, were something else. I made some adjustments to it and asked him to reapply and voila, his application got accepted in less than 2 days!

6. Be Strategic About Your Navigation/Menu

While you might not be hit with a “low value content” message with a terrible navigation or menu layout, your AdSense application can be rejected “Site Behavior: Navigation” policy violation. To prevent that from happening, there is a simple, yet effective navigation layout Google expects from every blogger hoping to monetize using AdSense.

The truth is that a solid navigation/menu layout is an important part of a good user experience. Your site should be easy to navigate before you apply for AdSense. Interestingly, Google gave a major hint that many bloggers are flagrantly disregarding.

Below is an excerpt from Google concerning what your navigations should look like before applying for AdSense:

The link to the above excerpt by Google can be found here.

In layman’s English, what this means is that the links to your core pages should be in your site’s header menu when applying for AdSense to boost your chances of approval. If you have more than 5 active categories on your site before applying for AdSense, you don’t need to include all five in your header menu. You can choose the most populated three and then include your core page links. Below is what my soccer/sports site menu would look like when applying for AdSense for the first time:

Homepage <> La Liga <> EPL <> Serie A <> About Us <>Privacy Policy <> Contact Us <> Cookie Policy

7. Check That Your Site’s Cache is Updated Before Applying

Did you know that you can check what version of your site Google has saved even for new websites? It is recommended to apply for AdSense ONLY when your site’s cache is updated. But why do you need this or why should you wait? The answer to this is that most site audits during AdSense applications are first done by bots. After bots vet a site and the site passes, the site is then sent to site raters who determine whether or not the site has quality content and is useful to users. AdSense is approved if the site is found to be useful or rejected if the site is deemed not valuable to users.

Here’s the catch and why you should be sure your cache is updated per the recent content on your site before applying. Bots can’t read like we do, so they rely on cache web pages to make sense of them. To see the most cached version of your site, add “cache:” to your site’s address in the address bar and hit the enter key. To see your site’s cached version, type cache:https://yoursite.com (replace yoursite.com with your actual domain name). If you get an error 404 while trying to check your site’s cache, then it means your site is new and a cached version of your site has not been generated yet. You should wait.

And one thing about web page caches you should know is that they can take anywhere from hours to weeks to update. For example, if you just published ten new content to your existing number of content and you apply for AdSense immediately, all the bots will most likely see are the last cached version of your site before the new articles were published. The same is true if you just made changes to your core pages, your site’s design/layout, or re-edited your content.

Conclusion: Wrapping up, it is important to think of your site and you as job applicants when applying for AdSense. You want to make sure you are properly dressed with the most professional theme that is not only responsive but fast and easy to navigate. Your EAT should be the most sellable part of your interview and should get you the job. The quality of your content and the structural layout of your blog should fix your AdSense low-value content rejection message. You also want to make sure your resume (website) is fully updated (cached) before applying for that “job interview”. All the best!