How to fix “Temporary ad serving limit placed on your AdSense account”

If you are a Google Adsense user or for that matter using any other services that are a Google Certified partner like Ezoic Premium, Mediavine, or AdThrive, you may be worried when you see the message that says “Temporary ad serving limit placed on your AdSense account“. I was no different, we use Adsense and other players as well and I was literally worried and thought to myself…”What the f***” has just happened ?”.

Below is the actual email I got from Google. The biggest issue is, we cannot email or call anyone. There is no form submission even for smaller sites, only Community support in forum…so, it can be pretty frustrating.

Does the above email means Ads are not served ? Account blocked ?

No, it does not mean any of that. The above email is an automated alert from the Google Alert system that has flagged your account saying something is wrong and they are just looking at it more closely. This is not done by human, it is by their automated systems…Not much you can do here…. Let’s look at why we got this now…

Why did I get “Email Temporary Ad Serving Limit Placed on your Adsense Account” Policy

I kept thinking about why am I getting this policy violation alert. Our website has been ( not whatareview.com, but our main website) with Adsense for over 10 years now and suddenly without any changes on our side, why are we getting this…I am was confused, worried and thinking to myself what to do…

I literally spent many hours or I would say few days reading up the entire issue and why it happens. To my surprise, many seem to get these…so, your stay or history with adsense does not matter… I could not comprehend myself why I got this.

After thorough research and my root cause analysis, I figured out that, below are the common reasons you may get it.

• if anything unsuual happens with your website that is interacting with Google Adsense. It could be anything like traffic or the calls made from your server.
• It could be a spam attack on your side that is making way too many calls to the Adsense servers.
• It could be that you are using Google Custom Search and you are not using it correctly, due to which the system flags it as alert.
• It could be that your advertisers have flagged for some suspicious activity.
• It could be anything that is not in your control and you would not even think of…

First thing, do NOT panic, it is not as bad as you think.

The above alert does not mean your ads are not displayed, it is just that

What many users on internet and forums suggest to do and Why NOT to do it ?

Many users on the internet say that you should remove all your Google Adsense code, archive your old ad units, and then start over. This way it becomes clean and you start over. This has solved for many users, that’s what they say…But, think about it for a second, it is the right thing to do ? Firstly, did you do any mistake ? Why should you do it ? These were questions in my mind…

We did not do anything wrong…so, we said to ourselves, if we do anything crazy like removing our ad units or archiving all of them and then leaving the site without AdSense, it means that we are admitting that something wrong was done by us…so, we choose not to do it as we did not do anything wrong. Some Adsense Experts also say that you should NOT do this…

Instead, we looked deeper on what all changes we did in the previous few days or weeks…think of all the theme changes, code changes, plugin changes, etc. Anything that touches your site and then do review.

What was our actual change we thought might have caused ?

In our case, we did not do any changes on the server-side, but we add Google Custom Search Engine and included AdSense in there. The big issue we think was we were using it on our site and many users were using it. So, suddenly I think the requests increased….it could that that’s why Google flagged us…

Again, this is after our analysis…but the thing is we would not know until the error is gone, if this was the issue. So, we were not sure. In any case, we removed the Google Custom Search Engine and went back to normal Theme search on WordPress and then waited for the changes.

How long it took to remove “Email Temporary Ad Serving Limit Placed on your Adsense Account”

We got this email on Jul 21, 2021 and it took about 18 days for the policy violation error to be gone. Frankly, we were nervous and kept waiting. But, we did not do anything wrong, so no point in removing everything, except the small change we did.

Some say, it can take up to 30 days…so, it all depends.. So, do not panic and stay calm, it will go away, if there is no fraud. Below is how you get notified in alert and how it look in policy center

Below is how it looks in Policy Center after the issue is gone.

What was your experience ? How did you solve ? Share your suggestions in comments below.