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7 ways to fix the Valuable Inventory: Under Construction error: How I got my website approved on Adsense

I used to monetize one of my websites, šŸ€ Website, with media.net. However, this monetization was not going well and was bringing me a solid round zero šŸ˜«

Hoping to improve the situation, I decided to switch it to Adsense. Since šŸ€ Website is an aged website with good content and organic traffic, I did not expect to have any issues. 

However, Adsense did not think so and rejected me right off the bat šŸ˜§

It took me a while to be able to run Google ads on the website. While trying to fix it, I had to do a lot of research and learned all (probably) possible reasons why Adsense may reject a website.

Here, I collected 7 ways how you can fix the Valuable inventory: Under construction error that Adsense gives you.

Also, I reveal what exactly helped me to fix the error and finally got approved šŸ˜

Read my story below!

ā€œValuable inventory: Under constructionā€ Adsense error

This is how it all started.

I added the website to my existing Adsense account and set up the ad code on the website.

Adsense informed me they need to do a validation of my website in order to make sure it can show ads.

The validation took about a dayā€¦ and it produced a conclusion that my website was not ready to show ads šŸ¤”:

Warning!  Your site isnā€™t ready to show ads Weā€™ve found some policy violations on your site which means your site isnā€™t ready to show ads yet. Valuable inventory: Under construction. As stated in our Program policies, we may not show Google ads on pages or apps where content is unnecessarily difficult or frustrating to navigate or interact with. This includes pages or apps that are under construction, not functioning, or lead to error messages.”

adsense_error_Under_construction

What a bummer! šŸ˜­

I went to check the Program Policies and Content Policies but it did not have any info about websites being under construction šŸ˜

Meanwhile, my website was already very much up and running and even making Amazon Affiliate sales (yes, you can use both Amazon Affiliate and Adsense on the same website without problems.) 

So, this message ā€œUnder Constructionā€ made no sense šŸ˜–

Without any useful info in the Adsense Program policies, I was left on my own and had to do my own investigation šŸ•µšŸ»ā€ā™€ļø

7 ways to resolve the Valuable Inventory Under Construction error

Here, I collected 7 possible reasons why your website is getting this error.

BTW, if you got it, it means that the Adsense code is installed correctly and Adsense was able to find it on your website. 

The error means that the website does not satisfy some particular technical criteria.

So, what could it be? šŸ¤”

If your website old enough?

It seems that Adsense works only with websites that are at least 6 months old šŸ‘¶šŸ»šŸš«

This is something I found being often mentioned in Adsense support threads:

 AdSense is for established websites only – at least six months old (but preferably a year or more)

However, I could not find anything confirming it in the official Adsense policies.

Still, if your website is new (less than 6 months old), you may get rejected by Adsense due to that. In this case, just wait a few months and reapply.

This was not my case, obviously, since my šŸ€ website is waaaaaay older than that (3+ years) šŸ‘©ā€šŸ¦²

Do you have enough content?

Could it be that my website was thin on the text content and Adsense did not have enough ā€œmeatā€ to put the ads on?

This is something I found on support.google.com. One of the upvoted replies was:

I’m sorry but Adsense will never approve your site because there are not enough texts on your site and the photos are not yours but from others. Adsense is a text-based affiliate program. That means that you have to write at least 50 posts with each 500 – 1000 words. Adsense will that you post unique and original content that you cannot find everywhere.

Not having enough textual content or not having unique content seems to be one of the most common reasons for getting the ā€œValuable inventory: Under constructionā€ error.

Ir order to solve it, just add more text content! Based on the Support thread above, it seems you need to have 25,000 – 50,000 words published on your website.

It was not my case, though šŸ‘…

My website also already had quite a lot of content that was not even purely commercial.

Here are the stats: 41,000+ words in total distributed among 21 posts and 4 pages (I excluded About/Privacy Policy/etc technical pages.)

Do you show ads on 404 pages?

I found this reason on this forum:

Avoid showing advt on 404 and maintenance page.

Apparently, Adsense may reject your website if you show ads on pages with thin content such as 404, About, and others šŸ˜”

The way how you fix it is, obviously, removing ads from these pages. 

I did not have ads on such pages. I use the AdInserter WP plugin that helps me to control which ads to show and where. So, it was easy for me to avoid making this mistake.

Do you keep making changes after submitting your website for Adsense review?

Once you applied for Adsense, it seems it is not recommended to change your website until you get the answer šŸ‘·šŸ»ā€ā™‚ļøšŸš«

In this post, the author described his struggle with getting Adsense approval. One of the reasons was that he kept tweaking the website UI and posting more content:

Valuable inventory: Under construction can also happen when you are still pending for approval but you made changes to your blogger layout/theme, pages and posting new article. DO NOT CHANGE YOUR LAYOUT OR THEME AND DO NOT POST OR ADD PAGES  DURING YOUR WAIT TIME FOR APPROVAL.

It seems that it causes Adsense to think your website is not ready yet. This may lead to the Under Construction error šŸš§šŸ—šŸ‘·šŸ»ā€ā™‚ļø

It was still not my case since I did not touch my website after I had applied for Adsense.

Does your website have a responsive design?

In the same post I mentioned above, the author wrote about the importance to have a responsive design on your website:

[…]after I changed it with modern theme which is mobile friendly […] they accepted my application within 3-4 days. 

It seems that if your website is not mobile-friendly, it may get rejected by Adsense.

Fortunately, all new WP themes nowadays are mobile-friendly. If yours is not, just change it to a different one.

My website had responsive design (I double- and triple-checked!šŸ˜…) so it again was not the reason for the rejection šŸ˜”

Is your website fast enough?

This is something I learned from my own experience.

When I sold one of my websites (šŸŽ Website), the new owner had problems with making it approved by Adsense.

Eventually, he managed to do it šŸ˜… He said the reason was that the website was too slow šŸŒ

You can see how fast is your website in Google Analytics: Go to Behaviour / Site Speed / Overview and choose some period, for example, 30 days.

I checked mine and the Avg. Page Load Time was whopping 10.73 sec!!! šŸ˜± It clearly got to be fixed, not only because of Adsense but for other reasons like SEO and simple usability!

Hereā€™s what I did to fix it (and you can do it as well):

  • Analyzed the website speed with GTmetrix (you can install the GTmetrix for WordPress plugin to make it more convenient to use)
  • Enabled more speed in the cache plugin settings (I use W3 Total Cache) based on the results I got from GTmetrix
  • Deactivated a bunch of plugins I no longer use (it seems to work really well on mobile)
  • Used the ShortPixel Image Optimizer plugin to compress images

After the changes were made, I managed to speed up my website by 31%. Still, it is not super fast but itā€™s definitely better than before:

rat_website_ave_page_load_time_improvements

Strangely enough, the PageSpeed Insights did not show much improvement in terms of speed score. Some of the warnings disappeared but the score improved just by a couple of points.

Before:

website_speed_desktop_mobile_before

After:

website_speed_desktop_mobile_after

Maybe that was the reason why it did not help me to get my website approved by Adsense.

After I improved the speed, I re-submitted it for the review but got a rejection again šŸ˜ž

I also compared the current speed of the šŸŽ website (after the changes done by the new owner) with the speed of my šŸ€ website, and the difference was minimal.

So, it was not the speedā€¦ then what?

Are you using a modern WordPress theme?

Another thing the new owner of my šŸŽ website did was changing the website theme. 

That website was running on some outdated version of the free Genesis Framework. It all worked fine and I did not see a reason to change it back then.

But it caused problems with Adsense approval šŸ˜•

It seemed that this was my last resort šŸ™šŸ»

I really hoped to avoid doing it on my šŸ€ website because it would mean re-doing the whole website design from scratch. I did not have the license for the WPZOOM Insight theme that was installed thus I could not just update it (the last update was installed 3 years ago šŸ™ˆ)

Up to this moment, I did not bother with this since the theme was still doing its job. 

Until it didnā€™t šŸ˜

I needed to change the layout of some post and the option that was supposed to do it did not work.

Ok, that was a clear sign that I needed to let the theme go! šŸ˜¬

I changed it to a free version of GeneratePress.

Then, I reapplied for Adsense yet again.

This time, in under 2h, šŸ€ Website got approved! šŸŽ‰šŸ’ƒšŸ»šŸ˜…šŸ˜ŒšŸ˜‚

The moral of the story

Conclusion: Adsense does not like outdated WordPress themes.

If you have the Adsense error ā€œValuable inventory: Under constructionā€ and your website is aged and have a ton of content, start right away with updating its theme.

Donā€™t waste your energy on other ā€œfixesā€! šŸ˜†

adsense_approved_my_website_email

 

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