I tried to get an AdSense approval for my site but I got a mail from AdSense saying the site is down or unavailable. But the site is definitely accessible and all the other requirements are taken care of. The site is also very old and the domain itself is 3 years old. There are no issues with page views as well.
Here is my situation.
I have an approved AdSense for YouTube. I got my blogger site upgrade to a top-level domain. This is the requirement to link your YouTube AdSense to your blogger site.
I have taken care of all the requirements to apply for the AdSense for my site.
1. Clean design and unique content. No issue with the design as I have created it using a blogger theme.
2. About page, Contact Us Page, Privacy Policy Page. These are mandatory
3. Top-Leve Domain
After applying for the AdSense I got the denial mail and looking at the reason, I was convinced that there must be a small mistake in the Domain setup or blogger settings.
I tried these things and found the culprit.
Make sure to check all these steps so that you will not get another denial.
1. Check if the site is accessible with different combinations of WWW, HTTP and HTTPS
krishtalk.com
www.krishtalk.com
https://www.krishtalk.com
http://www.krishtalk.com
Note that my site still runs without HTTPS, yet to add SSL certificate.
All these combinations worked.
So no issues at this point.
2. Check the DNS settings from your Domain service provider. All CNAME settings were found to be good. Going wrong here has less chances, if there are any issues with your domain settings, your site may not be accessible.
So no issues found yet.
3. Check if you have custom rebots.txt enabled
This is one of the major reasons why approval is denied. Check the settings of your blog or you can just check the content of your robots.txt by appending robots.txt to the domain URL
http://www.krishtalk.com/robots.txt
Make sure that your robots.txt is not blocking any of the Google servers.
This is the default robots.txt from my site.
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://www.krishtalk.com/sitemap.xml
checked my blogger settings and custom robots was turned off.
This is also clean and not the culprit for my approval denial.
4. Upload your sitemap to Google.
I had done this before but, I did upload the sitemap.xml again. I am not sure if this will cause any issues. As long as your pages are searched from Google and you are getting the views then this should not be a problem.
I do not think this was a problem for my site.
5. While configuring your custom domain you might have selected the option "Redirect Domain".
You will get an option to redirect your non-www site to www site under the Publishing tab of your blogger settings.
like krishtalk.com to www.krishtalk.com
When I checked this setting, it was turned on. I guessed this could be the issue. Since we are providing the non-www site while applying for AdSense. It is better to turn off this redirection. So Google can find and navigate the www site.
My guess was right. After changing this setting, I again applied for review. After 2 days, I checked the status and it was approved. :)
Thank you and let me know what worked for you.
Notes: If you are applying for the AdSense for the first time for your blogger site, then you have to do it from within the blogger's earnings tab.
If you already have an approved AdSense then you have to have a custom domain and from the AdSense account login, you have to apply for the site approval.