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JOSEPH: Hi.
Welcome to the Google AdSense.
I'm Joseph.
And today I'll be talking about how you can fix ads.txt file
issues in order to ensure your ads.txt files can be crawled.
If you haven't watched our video on ads.txt
and its implementation, we recommend
you to watch it first to make sure your ads.txt
file is set on your domain.
Once an ads.txt file is set on your domain,
the Google crawler will attempt to crawl the file
and parse the contents of the file
to determine seller's ID that they're authorized
to monetize their inventory.
Please be patient after you've made these changes,
as it may take a few days for your changes
to be reflected in AdSense.
Today, I will give you six recommendations
to work through your ads.txt file crawling issues.
Let's get started.
Recommendation one, make sure your ads.txt file is available.
If a previously seen ads.txt file
is unavailable on a subsequent re-crawl,
the previously seen entries will be
purged if the response is a hard 404 error
or retained for up to five days if the response is a soft 404
or a 500 server error.
Two, confirm that the file is reachable from the root domain.
Redirects from domain.com/ads.txt
to www.domain.com/ads.txt are fairly common.
ads.txt crawling will start at the root domain.
And the root domain needs to return from or redirect
to the ads.txt file.
Three, true crawling is allowed by robots.txt.
The ads.txt file for a domain may be ignored by crawlers
if the robots.txt file on a domain disallows
one of the following-- the crawling
of the URL path on which an ads.txt file is posted
or the user agent of the crawler.
Please check out the links in the description of this video
to see examples on the help center.
Four, make sure the file is returned with a status code
HTTP 200 OK.
While the request for an ads.txt file
may return the contents of the file in the response body,
if the status code in the response header
indicates the file was not found,
the response will be ignored, and the file
will be considered non-existent.
Five, ensure there are no formatting
errors or invalid characters in the file.
Formatting errors, such as invalid whitespace characters,
may be difficult to detect but can
make an ads.txt file difficult to parse by a crawler.
Because of that, a file might be ignored.
Avoid copy and pasting ads.txt entries
from a rich text editor.
We recommend a plain text editor.
You can also check for invalid UTF-8 characters
in your ads.txt file using a HEX editor.
Last but not least, recommendation six,
make an ads.txt file reachable via HTTP and HTTPS.
The Google crawler attempts to crawl all ads.txt files
on both HTTP and HTTPS.
However, a 404 response causes previously
crawled entries to be purged, even though an ads.txt file
is scrolled via HTTP.
Therefore, if crawling via HTTPS returns a 404,
the previously crawled entry will be purged.
To summarize, we have six recommendations that
are having available ads.txt file,
make sure the file is reachable from the root domain,
allow crawling by robots.txt, have
a status that is HTTP 200 OK, make
sure your file is free of formatting errors
or invalid characters, and finally, ensure you ads.txt
is reachable via both HTTP and HTTPS.
We hope this video helps to ensure your ads.txt
file can be crawled.
To learn more, you can visit the AdSense Help Center
at AdSense website via the link in the description
of this video below.
Last but not least, make sure to subscribe to the Google AdSense
channel for more best practices and tips on how
you can grow your site further.
Thank you for watching, and let us know in the comments section
if you have any suggestions for new videos.
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