David Leigh

If you ever read any of the webmaster/seo forums you may have come across mention of the so-called minus 30 penalty. It is easy to find out if your website is suffering from it because none of your pages rank above page 4 of the results (position number 31) and even if you search on “www.yourdomain.com” in Google you won’t find your site listed until the 4th page.

One of my sites was struck by it mid-September, when many pages that were top ten (and usually 1-3) suddenly plunged in the SERPS. I didn’t notice the pattern for a few days though, where almost every single search enquiry ranked at 31 for that domain.

Since then I’ve reworked the content, added plenty of new pages, got some good new links, got listed in Yahoo Directory and filed a reinclusion request with Google. However, all of this has been to no avail and public facing Googlers won’t let us know what we are doing wrong - they regard us as web spammers.

Well, thanks for that Google, but I’m trying to run a legitimate business. Tell me what I’m doing wrong and I’ll sort it. No problem, ok?

Since my rankings are so poor in Google I’ve decided to run a little experiment. First I’ve blocked Google from almost the entire site using robots.txt. When “www.domainname.com” ranks where it should in the SERPS I’ll start allowing the Googlebot to access other areas of the site.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Adsense arbitrage is something I’ve thought about doing in the past but never got around to actually doing. This changed just before Christmas, when I read a report written by Brad Callen regarding a client of his who was making good money from it. Although he didn’t give full details, Brad did at least outline the method and I decided to give it a go.

As I was making a few dollars a day I decided to read up on Adsense Arbitrage a bit more - you can read an excellent explanation of “traditional” Adsense Arbitrage at Graywolf’s SEO Blog.

I decided to explore this a bit more - first I bought Brad’s Keyword Elite software and after some more success decided to go full out and bought Adsense Arbitrage And Leverage by Michael Plante. The book describes the exact process he uses to earn somewhere in the region of $200 per day in profit.

I’ve been applying the model that Mike decribes and I’m happy to say it works beautifully. I’m not at $200 per day yet, but I’ll continue working it and see how far it goes. My feeling is that Google will get wise at some point and clamp down on this, but at the moment Mike’s method is an excellent opportunity, so use it while you can.