Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've applied for Adsense about a year ago, and was declined. A minor part of the content was deemed illicit, which it probably is in the US but not where I'm based.
I thought maybe by now due to ongoing Google localization the policy might have changed, so I'm thinking about re-applying. Could this hurt my Google rank in any way? The idea here being that since part of my content is frowned upon, this would be something that Google maybe would like to exclude from their search index as well?
Any ideas greatly appreciated!
It has often been specualted that membership in AdSense might benefit your rankings. It is true though that once you are enlisted and have ads on your site, MediaBot comes along and spiders your pages so it knows which ads to display. However Google themselves don't get tired saying that MediaBot and GoogleBot are two completely different issues, and that membership in AdSense does not affect your ranking in any way. Experiments from members here have indicated that it's true. But I've also heard reports where a strange temporal coincidence between getting approved for AdSense and improvement of ranking was seen.
My personal point of view:
I don't believe that there is NO connection between what MediaBot sees and what GoogleBot sees. GoogleBot explores on its own, while MediaBot is submission-driven. I DO believe that MediaBot "talks" to GoogleBot, but only in a way to say "Hey, brother, here's a new site submitted to me which you seem to have not found so far or negelected otherwise". I believe Google if they say that AdSense does not affect rankings. But they would be dump to ignore the stream of URL's which MediaBot provides. I also believe Google is smart. So if MediaBot reports a new URL to GoogleBot, GoogleBot does not rush and take a look. On the contrary, I guess several days to weeks might be in between...
