How to show website ads and appear in search results

We have been having issues with getting Google AdSense to allow us to serve ads on our WordPress website.

The message we received was “Your site doesn’t have enough unique content or provide a good user experience”.

This may have been due to having the required files saved in the main root folder instead of the WordPress root folder. This means the crawler may have been looking in the wrong place.

To help us get a positive outcome, we added the ads.txt file to the wordpress root folder, along with a robots.txt file.

We also uploaded a sitemap in the root directory which directs the web crawlers where to look on the website.

Once the crawlers know where to search, they will be able to index pages to show in search results.

This setup process was completed in the Google AdSense site.

In the Google search console, we started to take a more in-depth look at our website’s performance.

Google only had the homepage as being indexed in the page indexing section. When a page is not indexed, Google will not be showing any stats for that page.

We performed a URL Inspection to check some of our website’s other pages.

When they were not found, it meant that they had not been indexed.

Google was aware of the pages existence after clicking the “Test live URL” button. The URL then became available to appear in Google search results. 

We then requested indexing of that page so the search result will turn up in Google sooner than waiting for Google to automatically crawl the website.

We had installed Google’s Site Kit plugin to connect to our Google analytics account. Our thinking was this would have helped with the indexing of our site and allowed us to serve ads.

Since the Site Kit plugin showed we had more users and views than the search console, we knew we needed to do more.

To create the sitemap we installed the Yoast SEO plugin. This plugin created the sitemap for the web crawlers to read.

The sitemap lists the time the last update to the website occurred. When the crawlers view the sitemap they can tell if there is new content that needs to be indexed.

Since the sitemap instructions have been added, we hope the lack of content issue is now fixed.

In Summary:

It is best to ensure you have enough original content displayed when setting up and integrating a new website with Google. A lack of original content will stop your site from being able to serve ads with AdSense.

In the root directory you should have:

• An ads.txt file which includes your publisher ID.
• A robots.txt file that gives permission for web crawlers to search your website.
• A sitemap.xml file which allows crawlers to see where they should go to index content.

There are multiple Google accounts to use to get information on your website’s performance and to assist with implementing ads.

• AdSense
• Analytics
• Search Console

A quick description of sitemaps can be found here: https://www.sitemaps.org/