Tools*

As AdSense publishers, we are all responsible for ensuring that our websites or blogs follow all of the AdSense Guidelines and Policies. 

If you actually take time to read, you'll also discover that those rules include the Webmaster Guidelines. That means, we have to make sure we follow those pretty closely - in fact, it's a must to learn the best practices for both AdSense and Webmaster policies.

Several of the most important things to remember:

• Don't practice keyword stuffing. This not only includes trying to use a "special keyword" as many times as possible in your page when it is unnecessary, it also includes using far to many labels or tags on your pages or blog posts. Although the Google search engine doesn't give nearly as much attention meta keywords as it once did (most modern search engines don't make a lot of use of meta keywords now), it's important that you don't stuff dozens of keywords into your meta tags either.
• Don't scrape content from other websites. Produce your own original work. This also means don't use things like article spinners (software to "rewrite" someone else's article) as these often produce useless and unreadable content, and is still not "original". It's simply someone else's work written in a slightly different way.
• Don't build an entire website of aggregated RSS feeds, since these are not considered "original", nor "unique". They're simply someone else's work. You can ad a news feed into your sidebar without causing yourself any issues, but an entire website whose contents are ALL feeds from somewhere is not suitable for Adsense, and likely to find itself hidden away at the back of the serps.
• DO create your own useful, unique, interesting, or helpful content.
• DO take time to ensure you don't provide content like hacked games, movies, songs, or apps as those are considered piracy, which isn't supported by Adsense.
  

Tools for Publishers

1. Feed the Bot Tools - an extremely useful set of tools to help you understand how crawlers and bots see your site, and to show you what you need to fix or change. NOTE: Tools are non available (2020) as they are being updated. I've no idea how long that will take since the site isn't mine. However, the site does provide other very helpful information about Google processes.
   
2. Broken Link Checker - this online tool checks your site for broken links and provides you with not only the number of broken links, but the pages where the links are found, and the source code where the links are located, making it easy to find and fix.
3. W3C Link Checker - another link checker from a very popular tech site, W3C.
4. PageSpeed Insights - Google's own pagespeed tool which will test your site for loading times for both the desktop and mobile use, and provides insight on how to fix the problems that might be slowing you down. The slower your site loads, the less likely people will stick around for long.
5. Mobile Friendly Tester - Google provides this tool to help webmasters determine how mobile friendly their sites are, whether it's a responsive site, or a dedicated mobile site.
6. Pingdom Tools - a set of tools useful for testing multiple site issues, including DNS and speed load times, among other things. Some are free, while some a premium services, but even the free services are helpful.
7. Above the Fold - another tool from Google to test your site for above the fold contents. It shows just how much of your content is easily seen when a visitor lands on your page. This tool was designed to help publishers place some of their ads above the fold, but keep in mind that you need to have more content than advertising displaying above the fold. If you want 3 ads above the fold, you better have more content taking up space than ads, otherwise you may find yourself at the lower end of the serps. This tool wasn't made to help you plaster all your advertising above the fold. That wouldn't be in the spirit of Adsense guidelines, nor webmaster guidelines. Personally, I don't see this tool as all that useful because ... well, on your own computer you can see exactly how much content you have "above the fold" simply by going to your own webpage.
8. Google Safe Browsing Tool - test your site for malware. Simply replace "www.google.com" at the end of the URL in the browser bar with your own website URL (or any other wesbite URL) and get a report for the last 90 day period.
9. Internet Archive - the internet archive is also known as "the way back machine". What this site does is archive screenshots of various pages from any website that has existed in the past ... sort of like a museum of website pages. Sometimes it's just interesting to look at old pages, but it can also be useful in helping you to recover pages of your own that you've lost. If they've archived the page, you can copy the text and images to replace your page. Not all pages of a website may be archived, so it's a matter of keying in the URL of the page you want to see if they archived it.
10. Text Browser - an online script that will reproduce any webpage as a "text only version" showing you just how much or how little of your site is visible to text-only browsers. This is important because many crawlers (including Adsense's own approval bot) only sees text. It's also important for accessibility: blind and nearly blind web surfers use screen readers, which read the text on a website audibly to the individual, allowing for even visually disabled people to surf the web and visit websites.
11. Scan My Server - test the security of your website or webserver for vulnerabilities, right online. No plugins or widgets requires.
12. Siteliner - scan your site for problems in multiple areas including duplicate content/common content, etc.
    

You'll note I haven't included tools like AdWords keyword tool - that's meant for advertisers and provides no value to publishers.  

I also haven't included the "AdSense Earnings Estimator" (or estimated earnings tool) because as far as I can tell ... it hasn't ever been right once. It's actually one of the more useless tools since there is no real way to estimate earnings from AdSense.

There are  many tools available from Google that can be used for free, but many of them require a skill set to use - in other words, if you aren't a developer or coder, many will not have a lot of use for the average person who writes a blog.

 

Updated September 2020