Violation with restricted page, Crawler Access error?

[csdude55]

I've had Adsense on my Private Messages pages for 15 years, but on Jan 6 I got a warning that there's a violation due to "no content" on these pages. Which is wrong, obviously, they would have to log in to a user's account to see each user's content.

So I went to "Crawler Access" and tried to give them access to my own account. I gave:

Restricted Directory or URL: https://www.example.com/members/pm/
Login URL: https://www.example.com/cgi-bin/login.cgi
Login Method: POST
Parameters:
action = process_login
username = [my username]
password = [my password]

When I click on "Test login" I get the pop-up from Google saying that if the page opens below then it's working, but it doesn't open. I have a lot of blocks on my site to prevent people from using it in an iframe and such, though.

After I click "Save Settings", the Status is "Crawling" with a green check box. So I THINK that it's working?

Then I created additional paths to:

https://www.example.com/members/pm/?folder=inbox
https://www.example.com/members/pm/?folder=sent

and so on.

But I'm still showing it as a violation, as of Jan 10 (well after I setup those paths). I requested a manual review, which was done but didn't change anything.

So what's the deal, how do I fix this? Any suggestions?

[keyplyr]

Seems everyone's pages are being recrawled and reevaluated: [webmasterworld.com...]

What may have gone unnoticed before may not now.

You likely will need to remove the ads from the page.

[csdude55]

The problem there is that Private Messages are about 25% of my traffic! There's nothing on these pages that would be violations by default; pictures open in a new window (with no ads), I even scan for certain words (like racial slurs) and don't show ads if they exist.

I just can't figure out how to get Adsense to look at the page and see something other than an empty page.

[not2easy]

For the googlebot in GSC you can test for blocked resources, but I can't say whether that would help with the "Mediapartners-Google" bot for AdSense.

[NickMNS]

I think you may waste a lot of effort for nothing. Because even if you get them to crawl, my guess is that any pages shown there is only seen once or twice so given AdSense's new policy even if you were to show ads none of that inventory would get filled. I would look to another service to monetize that content, affiliates or even try Media.net.

[keyplyr]

As a work-around... can't you put some static content on that dynamic page just to satisfy Mediapartners-Google?

[csdude55]

That's not a bad plan, keyplyr... I just can't figure out what they're seeing.

If you're not logged in, going to example.com/members/pm/?folder=inbox redirects you to example.com/members/login/?$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] using PHP's header():

$qs = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
$qs = str_replace("return_here=" . $_GET['return_here'], "", $qs);

// Check that the user is logged in 
if ($_COOKIE['user']) $user = stripslashes($_COOKIE['user']);
else $user = false;

if (!$user) { header("Location: $home/members/login/?$qs&return_here=$return_here"); exit; }

They're not warning about /login/, though (which has a few FAQs and the privacy policy), so I don't know if that's the page they really don't like?

Weird thing I just discovered, too... example.com/members/pm/?folder=inbox is still showing ads, but the Policy Center shows the warning updated as of today. ?

[csdude55]

Just to give you guys an update, I actually got to speak with a Google rep on this and she said that the problem wasn't actually with the page being reported, it was the /login/ page that didn't have enough content.

I removed ads from the /login/ page but still have the policy violation error, so she's helping to get it removed right now.

I just thought it worth mentioning since I don't think this could have been resolved without help from Google.