FIXING THE ADS.TXT WEEBLY WARNING

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UPDATE - You can now add your Google Ads information directly in your Weebly site under Settings > General, then scroll all the way to the bottom.

If that doesn't work for you, read on.

If you're like me, you blog as a way to bring in a side income. I do it to promote my children's books, help other parents by talking about things that affect me, and in all of this, I also get paid for advertising. So, when I logged into my Google Adsense account recently and found a warning letting me know I'd be losing income if I didn't correct an ads.txt issue, I spent days figuring out how to fix it. Only, since I use Weebly, it wasn't easy or straightforward. If this is you, I hope I can tell you how to fix it, right here and now. (read more)

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ADS.TXT WEEBLY WARNING - WHAT IS IT?

In a nutshell, ads.txt is something Google has implemented that allows people like you and me to tell advertisers that it's okay to advertise on our site. We're telling them that we're legit bloggers, not junky spam sites, and that if they want to spend money with Google and put their ads out there, our site is a good place to do it. 

Basically, it's like Google Ads mark of approval. Yes, you will get advertisers without it, but not NEAR what you'd get if you had it. It will affect your income, so when you see the warning, you need to fix it. 

Here's what happened to my income within days of seeing the warning. Now, you'll see that I'm not making bank with my advertising yet, but I'm a new blogger, so I do expect this will continue to increase as I continue to put out helpful articles. Seeing my income drop from almost $1.00 a day to a few cents a day, that hurt.

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The $0.97 day was two days after the warning showed up. After that, it was three or four cents, and then I figured out how to fix it. My income is increasing once again, thank goodness.

So, let's talk about how you fix this error if you're like me, and you use Weebly.

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ADS.TXT WEEBLY - WHY IT'S COMPLICATED

When you see the ads.txt warning in Google Adsense, what you are supposed to do is create and ads.txt file on your computer that has some information in it, like this:

google.com, pub-0000000000000000, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0

You replace the "pub" section with your publisher ID, which you can find by going into the Account Information section of your Google Adsense site. Your publisher ID will show up at the top of the page, so all you need to do is copy and paste.

Ideally, you copy and past those four pieces of information, save the file as ads.txt, and then insert the file into the root directory where you host your site.

The trouble is, if you host with Weebly, you don't have access to the root directory. They know of the issue, they know it is an issue, they just haven't done anything about it. 

Maybe they will in the future, I don't know. I figured it was best to find a workaround since I didn't want to transfer my whole site and mess with all the SEO I've worked so hard on.

If you want to read the discussion, you can find it here.

Here's where you find your publisher ID:

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ADS.TXT WEEBLY - THE WORKAROUND

This is what worked for me, so if it works for you, please let me know. It took about a day for Google to crawl my site again and get the information it needed, but it does appear to have taken care of the error. 

And, as I said, the biggest thing is that my income is climbing again.

You're going to want to start by heading over to Blogger and creating a new blog. It doesn't have to exactly match your current blog. I had to use tythehunterauthor because tythehunter was already taken, it still worked.

So, head there and create a new blog, that's step one.

Next you're going to find the ads.txt section in your new Blogger blog. It'll be under Settings > Search Preferences, like so:

Once you've gotten to this place on the Blogger site, you're going to want to copy the four item text we talked about earlier. Make sure you've replaced PUB with your publisher ID.

Click on Monetization, and then click edit:

Paste your specific text into the box, then click save. 

Now, if you go to your BLOGGER site /ads.txt, you should see a page with only this text on it. 

For example, mine would be www.tythehunterauthor.blogspot.com/ads.txt

Go ahead and type your blogger site/ads.txt into your search bar to make sure it works. We're going to be redirecting to this page.

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ADS.TXT WEEBLY - THE REDIRECT

What Google Adsense wants to see is www.yoursite.com/ads.txt. It needs to be able to crawl that specific URL and see the information it wants to see.

Fortunately for us, it does support a redirect, so we're just going to fake it on Weebly.

There might be a simpler way to get this done, but I couldn't figure it out, so I'll just tell you what I did, and you can tweak it from there. 

First off, you're going to want to create a new page in Weebly. You're going to want it to be hidden, and you're going to want it to link to your blogger page, so I suggest you make an EXTERNAL PAGE that directs to your BLOGGER/ads.txt URL. 

Click External Page:

Name it something you'll remember, like ads.txt. Then enter in your blogger/ads.txt URL as the redirect. Make sure you don't hide it from search engines, they need to be able to see it.

I didn't want this page visible in any menus, but I couldn't figure out how to make it invisible, so I just hid it under another menu page that was invisible, like so:

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ADS.TXT WEEBLY - 301 REDIRECT

We're almost done. Now you just need to go to the settings menu of your Weebly site and click on SEO.

From there, navigate to the bottom of the page and click on the plus sign to add a new 301 redirect:

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From here, all you need to do is choose the name you want to call the redirect page. You want to call it /ads.txt.

That should be all you have to type in, just /ads.txt. This will make a URL that is www.yoursite.com/ads.txt which is what Google is looking for when it crawls your site.

Click on the destination page and choose the ads.txt page you just created, the one that redirects to your Blogger site. 

Now, you should be able to type in www.yoursite.com/ads.txt and it should redirect to the ads.txt page you created in blogger.

This should take care of your issues, I hope.

For me it did. It took about 24 hours, but the warning disappeared.

Let me know if it works for you!
​Ty

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