How long a new website or blog wait before applying for AdSense?

A lot of publishers from India and other Asian countries are puzzled on whether they can use AdSense Ads on new sites or not. Recently Google disabled a massive number of AdSense accounts from India and Pakistan which adds more to the confusion. To make it worse, Google does not mention anything in their policies for India about the minimum age requirement for blogs and websites to use AdSense Ads on the websites.

Requirement to get AdSense application approved

The AdSense approval depends a lot on the reviewer and the impression he get on the applicant and the site/blog. Google has a lot of published and unpublished rules for approval of an AdSene application, but those rules are flexible enough for the reviewer to come to his own on conclusion whether to approve or not.

There is no rule that says the blog has to have X number of visitors, Y number of pages views and so on. If you do a quick Google search, you can find a lot of confusion on the web defining the minimum number of page views and visitors a website must have to get AdSense application approved. Google looks at the quality of the content (uniqueness, well written and so on) and the nature of the website. If you have a website filled with scripts, ads, and other non-content stuff, you probably will fail to impress the reviewer. A clean site with easy navigation structure is sure to win.

If you are new to AdSense and want to apply for AdSense for your new website, I strongly suggest few things:

1. Wait several months until you have a lot of high quality articles. 6 months to 1 year is not a long wait for a life time AdSense account.

2. Wait until you have a lot of high quality article that really add value to the web. Re posting specification of latest gadgets is not really considered as high value content by Google. Rather, research on your topic of interest. If you are writing about gadgets, go to shops and take pictures comparing it with other similar products. Keep it side by side with other products and prepare comparison reports. If you are writing about tourist places, visit the place yourself and take pictures. If you are simply referring to another website and prepare an article in your own words, it is not going to be helpful.

3. Do not use a lot of scripts, ads and fancy images on your website. Visitor count, Feedburner subscriber count, List of your friends’ website etc all can wait until you get established and have your own AdSense account. (I do not mean you can have all unwanted stuff after you get the AdSense).

5. Keep the website clean and make it easy to navigate. Focus on the content. Make it easy for readers to reach various sections of the website. Provide a clean menu with limited links to your core categories.

Should a website or blog wait 6 months before using or applying for AdSense?

Google does not talk about the 6-months requirement anywhere in the policies. However, one of the help topics vaguely mention that publishers from India and China should wait for 6-months before they can apply [or, use ?] AdSense. There is no definite answer on which countries fall under this category. There is strong demand from top AdSense community to enforce this rule for all countries, which make perfect sense. No website can earn much traffic before it reach 6-months life in the web and the AdSense is not going to bring any reward for them in the site without traffic. So, why can’t webmasters wait for 6 months? Also, strictly enforcing the 6 months requirement will turn away a huge number of fraud applicants. Of course this will affect few big publishers who start new business, change domain nameetc, but they always have the option to reach their AdSense account managers and get special approval. Google is not very clear on whether existing AdSense accounts can be used on new sites. I have used my AdSense on my new sites without knowing the new requirement but did not have any problems, but my friends have lost their AdSense accounts for doing the same. So, if you create a new site, just wait patiently for 6 months before you use AdSense there. After having burnt my fingers, I usually wait until my new site reach 6 months + minimum 1000 page views per day before I use my AdSense account on it.