No login sites for AdSense?

I got rejected...

[Kevin Lawrence]

Hi all,

I'm opening a hockey-related website, and am trying to gather advertisers. I applied to AdSense, but I got rejected because my website has a forum, which allows registered users to login. However, I have seen other websites with the Google AdSense advertising on it, that have login systems. Does anyone know what is going on?

<snip>
<paraphrase>difficult navigation on site; requires login</paraphrase>

[edited by: Jenstar at 6:29 am (utc) on Jan. 28, 2004]
[edit reason] No email quotes as per TOS, thanks! [/edit]

[loanuniverse]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Kevin. Other people have had success with allowing the mediapartners bot into message boards by granting it a username. However, your best bet to appeal this decision would be if there is significant content on the site that can be viewed without the login.

You can approach this a couple of ways and see if it flies {of course mantain a professional attitude towards the whole exchange}

1) If there is significant content that does not require login and this content does not share the forum template, you can respond by saying that you will keep the ads on the other content only.

2) If login is not required, and is only an option for registered users you can mention this also.

3) You could see about implementing a solution to allow the bot to crawl the content and inform google about it.

These are off the top of my head, wait and see what other people come up with.

BTW, the posting of emails is frowned upon in these woods :)

[Jenstar]

Any reason why you can't allow all users to view your boards rather than requiring login to view? Most message boards give the option of allowing all users to read, but only registered users to post. Google really doesn't want to even send the mediabot into private pages.

[Kevin Lawrence]

Everything on the website can be viewed by a user who's not logged in, which includes forum posts and gallery images. Registration allows users to post messages, send private messages, and upload pictures. Guests can even posts messages in the forum, but with the username Guest.

I'm going to email them back and ask them to re-evaluate my website, and try to explain that all content is viewable to all users.

Thanks guys, I'll let you know what happens :]

Oh, and btw, sorry about the email post, I wasn't sure