David Leigh

I’m most of the way through Stompernet’s latest video, the first of their Going Natural 3.0 series and blown away. Presenting the story of how Brad Fallon’s multi-million dollar business was blown away when it was dropped from Google’s organic listings and how Dan Thies headed up new research into AdWords to save that business from certain catastrophe, this is a really fresh look at how the AdWords game has changed and what to do in 2008.

One of the tools mentioned - in fact the only tool so far - is Microsoft’s Commercial Intent tool, which has yielded some surprising tools for one of my niches.

In fact, I’m going to see what happens if I use it to screen keywords in the Thirty Day Challenge/Immediate Edge niche research stage, as it may help identify really strong keywords that are off the radar at the moment. (more…)

This weekend Dan Raine and Ed Dale have announced some amazing new tools for members of the 30 Day Challenge, which I would urge you to join if you are remotely interested in online marketing - and it’s completely FREE. The tools, which have been a few months coming, are designed to cut out the tedium of social bookmarking by doing it all for you automatically and will save a ton of time.

At the same time they made an enhanced version available to members of Immediate Edge and another great reason to join.

All in all 2008 is a great time to be an internet marketer - I’ll see you inside the 30 Day Challenge or Immediate Edge.

Jonathan Ledger is currently promoting a free ebook entitled Search Engine Myths Exposed to his mailing list. The video doesn’t really explain very much about it but you can find out more from his site here.

I don’t know how good this report will be, but worth taking a look when it comes out anyway.

Just back from eating a great Indian chicken curry recipe at Restaurante Namaste in Barcelona with Dan. Almost went to the wrong restaurant as there are 2 of the same name and only one shows up in Google, but we talked to the owner at the end about his website which turns out not to be indexed. (more…)

Just read a great blog post by Jim Boykin about how selling links won’t get you a Google penalty. Jim is an expert on link building and so I like to follow his blog, a much better use of my time than reading the crap that appears in the SEO forums.

I know that many people who read this will think that this is impossible, but I was telling Dan (fellow Stomper/30 Day Challenge/Immediate Edge/fellow ex-pat Brit in Barcelona) recently that I got a page to rank in Google in 15 minutes using the techniques used in the 30 Day Challenge and Immediate Edge.

He was stunned, but luckily he believes me. Anyway, I decided to write an article for one of my websites tonight. I published it less than 25 minutes ago, but when I checked 14 minutes after publishing on Wordpress doing all the Web 2.0 SEO stuff it was ranking at #1 already. OK, so it isn’t a competitive phrase, but how long does it take you to rank?

Let me tell you this; Immediate Edge works; 30 DayChallenge works; Ed Dale and Dan Raine are SEO Gods.

First Squidoo started to act against spam on July 5th and then lensmasters reported that many Squidoo lenses were losing their rankings over the weekend.

Was this due to Google taking action against Squidoo, as many people fear; or the result of sites “insulating” themselves against the sudden increase of Squidoo spam reported last week and Squidoo therefore losing backlinks as claimed by Squidoo? (more…)

Google seems to be going through some kind of algo change with reports pages dropping in the SERPS. Squidoo lenses seem to have been particularly hard hit over the weekend; I wrote a new lens last week which was on the first page on Saturday. It was still there this morning but has now disappeared, just as it brought in a sale.

In the immortal words of Douglas Adams; don’t panic.

Matt Cutts is asking for feedback on Google’s webmaster guidelines, which is a good thing as they are too vague in places and contradictory in others. Maybe when I have a bit of time I will comment, but I’m out of town at the moment so it’s not the right moment for me.

 What I really want to know is why Google sunk one of my sites in September. I then wasted 3 months going through it, tweaking, rewriting and searching for anything that Google might no think was up to scratch.

Despite following Matt’s advice and requesting feedback in the webmaster forums and submitting a reinclusion request, the site never ranks higher than 30 for any search term. That sucks.

Maybe one day I’ll finish my 5 things I love about Google and 5 things I hate. Matt makes an appearance, but I won’t tell you on which list

 He deleted the first comment I made on his blog, I have’t been able to return the favour to date.

I recently read some positive comments about Auction Ads, an alternative to Google adsense which allows you to display Adsense style ads website of Ebay listings. You earn commision from people signing up with Ebay as well as earning a percentage of the total amount.

It sounds a great product and so signed up, putting the code on just one page, but with a good number of daily page views and excellent Adsense clickthough rate. I left it for a few days and waited for the money to come rolling in.

Unfortunately Auction Ads on this test failed to perform at all. The Adwords CTR on this page is generally 30-40 percent, which is way above my overall average, so one of my top earning Adsense pages; the Auction Ads CTR on the same page in exactly the same position was….

…just 2.6 percent and my total earnings over this period were $0.

I’m not going to write Auction Ads off at the moment, I’ll take a look at running more tests, but what I do know is that you need to be careful. If you do change over do it slowly, preferably split testing each change. In this particular example I think that the Adsense Ads are much better targetted to the page than the Auction Ads, hence the excellent CTR, so I’ll look at a fairly high traffic page with bad Adsense CTR as my next test.

Let me know how you are getting on with Auction Ads.