AdSense Name Changes - What's In A Name?

What's your name? No, I mean your real name...the name on your identity papers, birth certificate or passport?

Well, when you apply for a personal or individual AdSense account, this is the name you must use. That's what AdSense would consider your payee name. When entering your payee name for AdSense on your account application, it's vastly important that you get it right. Sounds easy, doesn't it? Apparently it isn't as easy as that. I can't even begin to tell you how many people come to the forum trying to find out how to change their payee name after they've been approved.

AdSense doesn't allow complete name changes. Only in a very few areas they allow you to edit your payee name if you've made a spelling mistake on the application, and they allow changes if you've married and had a name change. Other than that, you simply can't change your payee name in your account.

Changing the payee name from your name to your brother or sister's name would be considered an account transfer, which AdSense doesn't allow.

It appears that now most areas (with the exception of a few) don't have the ability to even edit their payee name to correct a spelling error.

In an AdSense account the payee name will have a link next to it to allow you to make corrections. If this link is not active, doesn't appear, or is grayed out, then you have no way to edit your payee name yourself.

The AdSense Help Center has a form that explains how to change a payee name, and includes a list of countries where payee names cannot be changed at all. From what we've seen lately in the forums, there now appears to be more countries that can't make these changes, but AdSense doesn't seem to have added them onto the listing yet. What that means is without a way to correct your name, you would still have to follow the instructions given, even if your country is not spelled out on the list.

Changing the payee name for countries or accounts who can't access the edit link is time consuming and often frustrating. Which is why it is so important to get your payee name right on your application - get it right the first time and you won't need to go through these steps.

To change your payee name if there's no active edit link you must first cancel your current AdSense account. Yes, cancel it. To do that, you must use the cancellation request form - do not simply delete your account. That will cause you all kinds of problems. Follow the steps on the cancellation form. If you have already accrued earnings in your current account and those earnings are over $10.00 US then AdSense will forward those earnings to you - they are usually issued 90 days after you cancel your account.

Account cancellations are permanent. Once you cancel the current account you cannot get it back and will need to open a new account.

Once you have received notification from AdSense that your current account is closed, you need to apply for a new AdSense account, making sure your payee name and address details are correct.

I'm sure some of you are wondering how so many people get their names wrong in the first place. Some are simply due to typing errors; some are due to the characters of different languages; some people apply with their user ID instead of their real names; and many are from invalid account acquirement. Some people have others apply for them, some people try to buy AdSense accounts because they can't get their own - the people actually applying for the account are not the people who will own the account, and very often the payee name is not entered correctly. Some are simply trying to "snow the system" by using someone else's name to get an account, thinking they can change the name later.

These latter reasons and people are the ones you have to thank for AdSense not allowing name changes - too much fraudulent activity in the past and even in the present time is now increasing the list of countries that can't make changes to their accounts - or at least it appears that way.

Although the question has been asked (what countries have been added to the list) AdSense has not issued a new list, nor given any indication that other countries were added, so we're left to guess.

So no matter where you live, getting your payee name right when you apply is crucial if you don't want to have to go through an account cancellation and reapplication later on.

The AdSense Test

Are You Ready for AdSense?

Contrary to many articles you may find scattered across the internet, Adsense is NOT for everyone. At least, not until you understand a few things and are prepared to follow the program and it's rules.

Are you ready for AdSense? Take the test and find out.

 
1. Do you know what a URL is?
2. Do you know what html is?
3. Do you know how to access html code?
4. Do you know how to copy and paste?
5. Do you have your own website or blog?
6. Is your website complete and launched?
7. Do you already have a stream of visitors to your website or blog?
8. Is your blog full of rich original content?
9. Did you write all your own articles?
10. Did you copy articles from other people?
11. Do you have free movies, music, or software links?
12. Is your site full of other people's videos?
13. Did you read the AdSense Program Policies and understand them?
14. Did you read the Webmaster Guidelines and understand them?
15. Did you read the Terms of Service and understand them?
16. Did you pay anyone for an AdSense "program"?

I'm sure some of you are probably thinking this is a joke, but it really isn't.
These are the sort of things we find ourselves answering in the AdSense Help Forums every day. Many people ask what a URL is and where they find it, or how to get one. Many more never bother to read the rules. Hundreds are taken in by websites selling a "product" related to Adsense. The fact is, you don't need to pay anyone at all to use AdSense.
Stay tuned for the Answers and explanations in The AdSense Test - Part 2


note: originally published on Qondio

Why Was My AdSense Application Rejected?

There can be many reasons for having a rejected application - from incorrect personal data, or a typing error in your website address (url), to poor navigation on your website, or content that's not suitable for AdSense.

Application Details

The details you fill in on your AdSense application must be correct, and complete. Your name will be the name your payments go to if you are approved for an AdSense account, so you need to make sure this is correct in your initial application. The same thing goes for your address, and other personal details.

AdSense applicants must submit their website url when they complete an application. The website url is the part that looks like this: http://helpfulinformationfornewbies.blogspot.com/ or www.google.com .

Your website url must be correct because AdSense reviews your website to ensure it fits with AdSense policy, and contains the type of content their advertisers want to place ads on. If you type the url incorrectly, or if your website doesn't yet exist, then AdSense is likely to reject your application because they can't access your website.

Double check all the details in your application before you click the submit button. Once you send it, you can't edit it. You'll have to wait for them to review it (this can take anywhere from a few days to a few months) and send you an email. At that point, you can edit your application to correct any errors and resubmit it again.

To learn more about the AdSense application, visit their help center.


Website and Content Issues

When AdSense rejects an application, the email they send is usually pretty generic. It might say "wrong page type" without giving any further details, or it might list "poor or no navigation", or "under construction" or any one of a host of other reasons, most of which aren't very detailed.

The best place to get help in determining the actual issue(s) will be at the AdSense Help Forum. Volunteers and "Top Contributors" deal with questions like this every day, and most of them are pretty good at being able to tell you what the reasons will be, and can sometimes offer other suggestions to help you get your application and website "AdSense ready".

Page Type issues can mean anything from content that isn't acceptable to AdSense and doesn't comply with their policies, to not enough content.

In the forums we constantly see applicants whose blogs or websites have almost no content - one post or article is not "content". It's a beginning, but it's not enough to satisfy advertisers, so it's not enough to satisfy AdSense.

For some areas of the world, AdSense requires that a blog or website must be 6 months old - this actually means they want you to have six months worth of content. If you open a blog or website in January, make one post and wait six months you probably still won't get approved. The blog might be six months old, but there is still no content.

There's a saying over at AdSense... "Content is King".

Content must also be useful to people, and interesting. A blog full of posts that aren't going to interest people, or provide some useful information isn't likely to interest AdSense either. The sort of content that's going "out the door" (ie: getting less approval) at AdSense are sites that are built specifically to earn income with "get rich quick" schemes, or money making sites that have no purpose other than to accrue income from AdSense.

All content on your website or blog must adhere to AdSense policies. If it doesn't, you probably won't get an approved account. To see what the content policies are, you can visit the AdSense Program Policy page.

Poor navigation issues can be anything from having "flash only" navigation, to having no navigation, or to having navigation or menu buttons that don't link to any page, to broken menu links.

All flash navigation is difficult for the bots to follow, and if they can't follow a navigation link, to them, it's broken - they may be able to follow some of the links, or none of the links. On top of that, many people still don't allow flash in their browsers, so those people can't use your website. You need to create text links as well as flash links. You can put the text navigation in your website footer or sidebar, or create a sitemap with text links and link to the sitemap with a text link on your home page.

Menu buttons or links that are meant for future pages should either be removed, or should link to the page. Don't leave incomplete links in your navigation menu.

One of the biggest navigation problems we see are with blogs. Everyone thinks because it's a blog, it already has navigation. In some cases, this is true, it does have a form of navigation...but only if you have a bunch of posts. It's the posts and their pages that create navigation in the form of the archives on most blogs. If you have only one or two posts, you really don't have much in the way of navigation.

You'll notice in the sidebar of this blog, the first thing is titled "Pages". That was created using a blogger gadget, and the blogger pages function. You could also use the links gadget to create a menu. In the links gadget you can enter a url (in this case, the url of the page with the post on it) and a website title (instead of a website title, I use the post title) - everytime I make a new post, it is added manually to that menu. Anybody visiting my blog doesn't have to hunt through the archives looking for a subject they want. It's in the post menu. As a blog grows and has hundreds of posts, you won't want to use this method. You'll need to do something else, like only include important posts. You should always have an archive listing in your sidebar for navigation, and a text sitemap can be very useful as well.

Under Construction might seem like a pretty specific reason, but for many it is anything but. We see lots of people in the forum whose websites aren't under construction, but that's the reason they are given.

We see this a lot with websites that contain mostly graphics or images, and very little text. Landing pages or home pages that have an image and no text are another problem, as are photoblogs and videoblogs (nothing but videos in a blog is not considered good content for AdSense).

Photos and images should always have "alt text" tags so they can be "seen" by the AdSense bots and crawlers. They can't see an image if there is no text, so a website or blog of nothing but photos will look completely empty. A bunch of pages with nothing on them is a website under construction.

Websites built entirely of flash can create problems too - sometimes they can crawl them, and sometimes they can't. The best flash sites I have seen are the ones that also have a plain html version of the site for users without flash in their browsers. Some of the worst sites I've seen are those that require you to use a specific browser, like IE only sites.

Language - AdSense has a list of supported languages, and if the language your website was built in is not on that list, you won't be able to get an approved AdSense account. You can learn more about the languages AdSense supports at the AdSense Help Center.

In the end, there are some websites and content that are just not suitable for AdSense advertisers. Not everyone is granted an AdSense account.