The eight AdSense rejection notices, and exactly what to do about each.

The most common rejection by a wide margin. Google reviewed the site and decided it does not yet contain enough original, useful material to justify serving ads. Design, spelling and effort are not the issue — substance and volume are. Typical triggers: very few pages, pages of a paragraph or two, content rewritten from other sites, or a tool or template with nothing written around it.

What to do

1. 1Count what you actually have: how many indexable pages, and roughly how many words of original material on each.
2. 2Remove or improve every thin page — fewer, better URLs beats more, emptier ones.
3. 3Write pages that each answer one specific question completely, containing something only you could write (your experience, your data, your examples).
4. 4Plan on a real body of work — for most new sites that means 15-30 substantial pages, written over several weeks.
5. 5Create a hub page listing your best content and link it from the main navigation so everything is reachable in one click.
6. 6Submit your sitemap in Search Console and wait until the new pages are reported as indexed before reapplying — Google reviews what it can crawl, not what exists.

Worth knowing: There is no shortcut past this one. Cosmetic changes and a quick reapply produce the same email again.

Broader and vaguer than low value content. In practice it covers several distinct situations: thin or unoriginal content, missing or empty policy pages, restricted content anywhere on the site (including comments and old archived pages), copyright problems with images or republished text, broken navigation, illegitimate traffic sources, or a layout that exists mainly to frame ads.

What to do

1. 1Start with content — thin or unoriginal material is the most likely cause and is labelled this way on some reviews.
2. 2Check the four policy pages: About, Contact, Privacy and Terms must all exist, say something real, and be linked from the footer of every page.
3. 3Search your own site for restricted content: adult material, copyrighted downloads, hacked content, anything you would not show an advertiser.
4. 4Audit your images and articles for rights — everything published must be yours or properly licensed.
5. 5Click through your navigation on a phone: every link should work and every menu item should reach real content.
6. 6Be honest about traffic: purchased visits, exchanges and incentivised clicks are policy breaches regardless of content quality.

Google could not crawl the site at all. The content may be fine — the reviewer simply never saw it. Common causes: robots.txt blocking Googlebot, a sitewide noindex tag, a DNS or certificate problem, a security layer serving crawlers a challenge page, or the wrong URL submitted.

What to do

1. 1Open your robots.txt (yourdomain.com/robots.txt) and look for Disallow: / or rules blocking Googlebot.
2. 2View source on your homepage and search for noindex — a sitewide noindex makes the whole site invisible to the review.
3. 3Test the exact URL you submitted, with and without www, and confirm it loads over HTTPS without a redirect loop.
4. 4If you use a firewall or security plugin, check it is not serving Googlebot a CAPTCHA or challenge page.
5. 5Run an automated crawl of your own site to see exactly which pages a bot can reach and which are blocked.
6. 6Fix the block, resubmit the sitemap in Search Console, and confirm pages are being indexed before reapplying.

When Google tried to visit, the site did not load: intermittent hosting, an expired or misconfigured HTTPS certificate, a redirect loop, or a domain that does not resolve. This is a technical rejection, not a content judgement.

What to do

1. 1Test the exact URL you submitted from a private window, with and without www.
2. 2Check your HTTPS certificate expiry date — an expired certificate is an instant 'unavailable'.
3. 3Look for redirect chains: http → https → www → non-www should be one clean hop, not a loop.
4. 4Check your hosting provider's status page and uptime history for the days around the review.
5. 5Once the site loads reliably everywhere, reapply — this is one of the fastest rejections to recover from.

The reviewer landed on a page with essentially nothing on it. Often a homepage that is only a hero image or a splash screen, a submitted URL pointing at an empty section, or a site whose content loads in a way the crawler cannot see.

What to do

1. 1Open the exact URL you submitted and ask: is there substantial written content visible immediately, without clicking anything?
2. 2If your homepage is a splash page or single image, add real introductory content or submit a URL that has it.
3. 3If your content is rendered by JavaScript, check what the raw HTML contains — crawlers may see an empty shell.
4. 4Make sure no empty category, tag or placeholder pages are linked in your navigation.

Google found pages that look unfinished: 'coming soon' notices, lorem ipsum text, empty templates, placeholder images, or sections marked as under construction. The site reads as not yet ready for visitors, so it is not ready for ads.

What to do

1. 1Search your site for 'coming soon', 'under construction', 'lorem ipsum' and placeholder text — remove or complete every instance.
2. 2Unpublish pages that are not finished rather than leaving them half-written.
3. 3Replace stock placeholder images and default template text with your real content.
4. 4Check your navigation for links to empty or unfinished sections and remove them until the pages exist.
5. 5Only reapply once a stranger clicking any link on your site lands on a complete page.

The reviewer could not get around your site: the menu does not reach your content, links are broken, pages are dead ends, or the navigation fails on mobile. Google requires that visitors can find what the site offers easily.

What to do

1. 1Click every item in your main menu on both desktop and a phone — each must reach a real, complete page.
2. 2Make sure every page is reachable from the navigation within two or three clicks from the homepage.
3. 3Remove menu items that lead to empty categories or placeholder pages.
4. 4Fix or remove any broken internal links — run a crawl of your own site to find them all at once.
5. 5Add internal links between related pages so no page is a dead end.

Google's systems matched this application to an existing AdSense account — usually one you opened years ago with another email address or Google account. AdSense allows exactly one account per person, so a second application is rejected regardless of the site's quality.

What to do

1. 1Do not apply again with a different email — that makes it worse, not better.
2. 2Try to recover the original account: search your old inboxes for AdSense emails and use Google's account recovery.
3. 3If you regain access, use that account and add your new site to it.
4. 4If you truly cannot recover it, close the old account through Google's account-cancellation process, then apply fresh once it is closed.

Worth knowing: This is an account problem, not a site problem — nothing you change on the site will fix it.