Every blogger (well, not every blogger, but you get what I mean) dreams of having ads running on their blog in order to generate some income to cover costs and even to be another income source altogether. I know how it feels when you apply for AdSense monetization, expecting the best outcome, but you get hit with a rejection for “Low Value Content”. At that moment, after reading that email, your world comes crashing down because you worked so hard to make sure you would get accepted on your first try. Yeah, I know that feeling. I’ve been there before. Let me take you on this roller coaster ride on how I finally got my blog approved by AdSense.

First things first, before you start publishing your blog posts, make sure you have these crucial pages on your blog: Contact Us, About Us or About Me, Affiliate Disclosure, Privacy Policy pages and an easily accessible Navigation bar. These pages do make a difference, and AdSense won’t approve your blog or website without them.

Storytime

Some time after I had started my blog, I was eager to get AdSense monetization, but I kept getting rejected, and I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. I had a “Privacy Policy” page, an “About Us” page, a “Contact Us” page, an “Affiliate Disclosure” page and a “Navigation” bar, which are all necessary requirements to get your AdSense account approved Oh and mind you, I had already published 42 blog posts. So what could be the problem?

First AdSense Monetization Attempt

Let’s start from the beginning, so a couple of months after I started this blog, I wondered, “Why not give AdSense a shot?”. After all, it could help pay for my domain and hosting fees and would eventually become profitable one day. I went through all the AdSense guidelines and made sure everything was in order on my blog. I had written enough blog posts and included all the necessary pages to make sure not to give AdSense a reason to reject my monetization request, but boy was I wrong. 

I hit the request button all excited and patiently waited for AdSense’s approval, but after a couple of days, I was met with disappointment. My monetization request was rejected and the reason? “Low Value Content”. The downside? AdSense provides you with multiple links to go through their guidelines, watch videos, and a whole lot of other information on the website, but they do not explicitly tell you exactly what you did wrong or where you did it. So you’re still left on your own to figure things out.

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Second Attempt

At first, I thought AdSense had made a mistake, so I re-requested monetization without making any changes to my blog because I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it, but I was rejected a second time. I decided to reanalyze my blog and find out exactly what was wrong with my blog.

Third Attempt

After the second rejection, I thought the “Tags” were the problem, because I read something on Reddit about having too many tags per blog post, which I did have, being bad for AdSense monetization. So I worked on my tags, reduced to a maximum of 8 per blog post and sent another request to AdSense, but guess what? I was rejected again, with the reason being the same generic “Low Value Content”.

Fourth Attempt

So then I thought maybe my posts had low word counts, so I worked on that. There was one blog post that had around 300 words. I decided to make it longer, but there wasn’t much to write about that very topic, so I just left it at around 400 words, but I made sure all my other blog posts had a minimum of 600 words per post. I sent out a request AGAIN and…I was still rejected AGAIN, with AdSense still stating “Low Value Content” as the reason.

Fifth Attempt

At this point, I was getting frustrated and angry too, because I couldn’t locate the problem and AdSense was unwilling to mention it either. There were times I thought I was rejected because my blog was fairly new and I wasn’t getting enough visitors because I was literally pulling in 0 pageviews on certain days. The highest page views I usually got was around 15 and I wasn’t even getting that every day, but somehow I felt that wasn’t it because some Reddit users claimed to have little to no traffic but were still approved for AdSense monetization. 

I also remember people also mentioning the importance of having an “Author’s profile” for monetization, but I did not want to add that because I felt the “About Us” page would suffice. So what I did was revisit the important pages on my blog: “About Us” page,  “Contact Us” page,  “Affiliate Disclosure” page and the “Privacy Policy” page. I edited all these pages to ensure that no important information was left out.

Oh, and mind you, I had already installed a “Cookie Consent” plugin during the onset of my blog to get the consent of visitors on my blog for cookie collection, so we can also rule this out as a contributing factor to the monetization rejection. I also published four additional blog posts during this period, bringing it to a total of 46 blog posts. After reviewing and editing all my important pages and adding more blog posts, I sent in another request. I was thinking “this was it” and I was finally going to get accepted, but boy was I wrong again. I was rejected again, and this was the fifth time.

Sixth Attempt

I was losing hope at this point, and I didn’t have the energy to perform any more tweaks on my blog because I mean, I couldn’t even tell where the problem was stemming from, so I just resubmitted my blog, and yeah, you guessed right. It was once again rejected after a couple of days for “Low value content”. And after losing all hope, I stopped working on the blog for a while because I was overwhelmed.

Seventh Attempt: How to Fix Low Value Content

I revisited the blog after a couple of weeks, and I decided to give AdSense one last try, but this time around, I decided to go back to my AdSense account and read in between the lines of the rejection, and you know what I came up with? NOTHING!!! The reason for rejection was way too generic and I couldn’t figure out exactly where to place my finger so I went back to my blog to look at it one more one time and I remembered a comment I once read on Reddit that danced arounced the lines of Adsense approving blogs with as low as ten blog posts.

Here was the case I had 46 blog posts, so why was I still getting rejected? I decided to visit each category on my blog and just count the number of posts present. As I kept doing that, I realized some of these categories had as few as three blog posts. Maybe, just maybe, that was the reason why my blog kept getting rejected? Was it because there were not enough posts in some categories? What if that was what “Low value content” meant all along?

If you take a look at my navigation bar or menu, you’d realize that the “Crowdsourcing” and “Others” categories have multiple subcategories. These subcategories used to be individual categories, and some did not have enough content. As I stated earlier, there were categories that had as few as three blog posts.

I decided to group the majority of my categories and put them under one major category. So that’s what you currently see in my navigation. After restructuring the categories, each major category had at least 8 blog posts. After this major tweak, I resubmitted my blog to AdSense for monetization, and after waiting for two excruciatingly long weeks, my blog finally got approved.  

So, it was the categories all this time. Not having enough content under my categories was what was causing the rejections. But I didn’t stop there, I wanted to be sure if my deduction of the rejection stemming from the quantity of the content under the categories was valid.

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Control Experiment

Guess what I did? I started another blog. This time around, I decided to focus on the categories alone, so that’s what I did. I created only two major categories on the new blog. However, each major category had a subcategory. I published a total of 8 blog posts under one subcategory and 6 blog posts under the other subcategory, then I submitted the new blog to AdSense for monetization. After a couple of days, a decision was made, and I logged into my AdSense account to check it out. It was a rejection for “Low value content,” but I was unfazed because I knew exactly why and what needed to be done.

6 blog posts were way too few for a category, so I upped it to 10 blog posts, and I added 2 more to the subcategory, with 8 blog posts, so I had 10 blog posts under each category, making 20 blog posts in total. I resubmitted it to AdSense, and after 17 days, the new blog was approved for monetization.

Final Thoughts

What’s my advice? When your blog or website is rejected for AdSense monetization, the first thing I suggest you should check is the number of blog posts under each category of your blog or website, especially if your blog was rejected for “Low value content.” I’d suggest you publish at least 10 blog posts under each category on your blog in addition to having and meeting all the AdSense requirements stated in their guidelines and policies. You can also check the summarized version of their “Website monetization tips to optimize your Google AdSense earnings.”

So, this is my account on how I got AdSense monetization on my blog after being rejected multiple times for “Low value content.” This is what worked for me. I hope it does for you too. If any of you happen to have a different experience with AdSense monetization and how to fix the “Google Adsense Low Value Content” situation, please don’t forget to share in the comments. I’m sure it’s going to be helpful to someone else.