Practical write-ups from auditing 1,000+ sites. New posts every 2 weeks.
Tool pages look identical to automated quality signals. Here's the 4-page fix pattern that takes most utility sites from rejected to approved in under a weekend.
Across 1,400+ site audits we ran between 2025-01 and 2026-06, ads.txt failures kept sites in 'ad serving disabled' longer than any other single issue. Here's what the file should contain, where it goes, and the 3 mistakes 80% of affected sites make.
Google's policy is intentionally vague. We translated the rejection patterns from 1,200+ rejected utility sites into a concrete checklist for content depth, originality, and structure.
We ran 800 audit results and correlated LCP / CLS / TBT scores with rejection rates. The answer surprised us: CWV matters, but not in the way most guides claim.
Navigation is one of the 3 signals Google's reviewer crawler actually reads. Sites with 8+ dangling pages or a single-level menu get flagged as 'low value'. Here's the 3-link fix that takes most sites from rejected to approved.
It's not a single signal. It's 11 features combined, and 2 of them (perplexity + burstiness) are visible to your own prose. A short reverse-engineering of the classifier.
Lazy-loading the ad unit is the easy answer. The right answer is reserving 280px of height before the script runs. We tested 12 layouts and 4 of them passed LCP under 2.5s with ads.
About, Contact, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service. Three of these are easy. The fourth — a real, named contact page — is what 70% of rejected sites get flagged on. Here's what passes review, and what doesn't.
A 30-day-old domain can pass on the first try, and a 10-year-old domain can still get rejected. Domain age is informational, not a quality gate. Here's what the reviewer actually weights.
