Adsense - low value content - help

Hi Guys,

I am pretty new to this field and I started my journey of building websites around last April 2021.
My website was based on the travel niche with articles on specific destinations/places to visit in many countries. (broad niche)
Something very similar to this website: https://www.busytourist.com/


All articles were based on keyword research. (A mix of easy to medium level long-tail keyphrases according to semrush)
I have posted 80+ articles with a word count of nearly 200k. The content was outsourced to freelance travel writers. Even tools like Market Muse were used for research purposes by the writers. The content was also checked for plagiarism and grammar using premium tools.
Copyright-free images from websites like Unsplash and Flickr were used - while this website was 100% white hat.

Currently, the website gets only like 5 -10 organics a day while it has been 8 months since the content posting started.

Here is where the problem starts ~` despite the low traffic levels I just had a go and applied for Adsense approval and got rejected for "low-value content". After some research, I found out that Google tends to consider travel content "based on research" to be low-value content - despite many similar websites dominating search results at the moment. In other words, for new websites, if the content isn't truly based on personal experience or not to be found anywhere else in the public domain you have no chance of ranking well on Google.

Kinda devastated after finding this out and spending so much time and money on the website.

Is this a dead-end for the website? Do I have any other workarounds to consider? Based on the feedback on the Google forum, the website won't rank well on Google even if it gets Adsense approval.

I am really in shock as I have seen really shitty websites with Adsense approval before.

Any feedback is appreciated!

Thanks!

Well, monetization wise you could use other things like push ads, native ads or other display ads companies but it'd be indeed very hard to rank on google in travel niche, there is just too much competition.

M0n3y. said:

Well, monetization wise you could use other things like push ads, native ads or other display ads companies but it'd be indeed very hard to rank on google in travel niche, there is just too much competition.

Click to expand...

Yes, but it will be pointless if I won't be able to rank on Google right.

My concern is if I should totally abandon this website? I've also heard that broad niche sites like this sometimes takes nearly 2 years to rank properly. Should I just take the word from Google forums and let this one go? Feeling terrible really.

I am willing to share Search Console stats if anyone can shed further light on this issue.

marblebeach said:

Yes, but it will be pointless if I won't be able to rank on Google right.

My concern is if I should totally abandon this website? I've also heard that broad niche sites like this sometimes takes nearly 2 years to rank properly. Should I just take the word from Google forums and let this one go? Feeling terrible really.

I am willing to share Search Console stats if anyone can shed further light on this issue.

Click to expand...

I want to encourage you and discourage you at the same time. It's possible to rank blogs like you are trying to rank. Whenever I do research they are usually using things like Mediavine, but of course, you need 50K visitors for that.
Usually, I think they rank due to the sheer amount of articles they have. All these sites that rank well with content like yours have thousands upon thousands of articles targeting keywords with volume as low as 10 searches a month. So meanwhile it's possible, it's not easy at all.

You may try media.net, though I don't think they will take you either.

paraztos said:

I want to encourage you and discourage you at the same time. It's possible to rank blogs like you are trying to rank. Whenever I do research they are usually using things like Mediavine, but of course, you need 50K visitors for that.
Usually, I think they rank due to the sheer amount of articles they have. All these sites that rank well with content like yours have thousands upon thousands of articles targeting keywords with volume as low as 10 searches a month. So meanwhile it's possible, it's not easy at all.

You may try media.net, though I don't think they will take you either.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply and honestly that's a relief to hear.
It's not the "Adsense approval" part I am worried about but being able to "rank" such a website on Google. If the traffic comes, the rest would fall into place I guess. And yes, these websites do have a lot of content and when analyzed on Semrush, these sites have taken 1.5 - 2 years to get decent amounts of traffic.

@marblebeach, how is you website doing now, have you been accepted into Adsense? I'm asking because I also have a travel website that struggle with getting traffic and approval from Adsense.