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Yeah, this page should return a 404 status code as a 404 page, not a 200.  Otherwise search bots (like Googlebot and Roger) will think this is a regular page on your site, and as such this page could appear in search results.

Go to your Keywords tab, and select that single keyword, Go to the Keyword details tab, and select "Auction Insights".  This will give you a bunch of useful information:

• Impression share: How often you ad shows up
• Avg. position: The average position of your ad when it does show up
• Overlap rate: You can see how often your ad appears vs. other advertisers
• Position above rate: How often you're ranking above other advertisers.
• Top of page rate: How often you're at the top of the page (vs. the side).

So if your average position is already between 1-2, and your impression share is high, raising the bid probably won't do much.  However, if you're not at the top of the page much, or your impression share is lower, you might be able to get more clicks by raising the bid.

Is there a specific reason you're bidding by CPM?  Are you simply going for branding, or are you trying to drive leads?  If you're a brand advertiser, it would make sense to optimize for impressions, but most people are looking for leads to their website, in which case it makes more sense to use CPC bidding.

An example of a brand advertiser would be Coke.  They don't really care if you click on their banners, they just want you to think of a coke next time you're at a gas station.

Sounds scammy to me, especially their "rapid backlinks" program.  Many of the users on http://www.trustpilot.co.uk/review/clicksubmit.co.uk list their domains in their testimonials, so you should be able to see some of their work.  Take a look at their backlink profiles and see what kinds of links they're getting.  I listed the ones I came across before.  I'd do it myself but I have pressing dinner plans I don't want to be late for!

• barn2.co.uk
• www.ziddidirect.com
• www.tiptopweddingshop.co.uk
• results.cheaphotelflightdeals.com
• www.greensupplements.co.uk
• www.tweakmusicmixing.com

They raised your bids, so your CPCs will be higher, so you're spending more.  If you're hitting your budgets now, it makes sense that you're seeing less clicks, since you're probably going through your budget with fewer but more expensive clicks.

Sounds like you have some bid tuning ahead of you!

I do this in the homeschooling niche.  The only precaution I take is to allow them to write whatever they want, and to not specify the anchor text they use when they link to me.  That way the links look natural, and they're lower risk for triggering any over-optimization penalties.

Not that a search engine can read intent (yet), but I don't do this for rankings; I do this for the traffic that comes from the post.  Since we're an education site, and lots of homeschoolers write about us anyway, so the relevancy of our site to the blog is high.  Also, a few sponsored posts don't look unnatural when there are also many natural posts and links about.

These blogs often have other sponsored posts and reviews, and a lot of them also do giveaways that I've participated in.  I haven't had any issues myself <knock on="" wood="">.  However, you never know when there could be another animal being released from the Google zoo!</knock>

Click over to the Keywords tab.  You're currently on the "Ad group ideas (beta)" tab, which is what it defaults to these days.

Getting any site off the ground is hard.  You gotta pound the internet pavement (so to speak).  What I would do is find where your potential customers or users are, and get them to engage with your site.  This could mean forums, social networks (Facebook, Twitter, G+, Quora, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc), or possibly PPC.  If you're not selling something, getting a good return on ad spending can be hard.

Do you guys have experience managing PPC?  There's a lot you can do with display advertising these days (retargeting, custom lists in Google Analytics, similar users, managed placements, demographics, audiences, topics, and so on).  You might consider tuning your budget down and only keep the highest ROI campaigns enabled, and devote the rest of your budget to other efforts.

I wouldn't do that. rel=canonical is supposed to point between truly or near-truly duplicate pages, usually when things like URL parameters are on URLs but don't do anything to the content.  These are completely different pages, category pages on your site, vs. ones on your blog.  I would not recommend it.  Chances are Google will just ignore your rel=canonical.  It would likely not do any damage to your rankings, but who knows down the line... you never know when they'll release a Google aardvark or some other animal from the Google zoo.

Note my work firewall blocked the blog URL so I was looking at a cached version on Google.  If the pages are truly duplicate (which they didn't appear to be), go for it.

SEOMoz has a list of recommended consultants/agencies here: http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended.  Hopefully you can find someone there!

Using these estimates initially sounds valid, but once you run things for a bit I would think you'd want to optimize based on your own performance.  Usually different ad groups and keywords will settle into a bid and ad position that works for them.

I've never tried to optimize to Google's first page estimates before.  As they're estimates, I would feel a little shaky relying on them like this.  But if it's working for you, go for it!

I always export and import via Adwords Editor... it lets you see the changes and places impacted by the import before making it live in your account.  It's always good to double check import data for errors!  Adwords editor also makes account management easier in a multitude of different ways.  You definitely do not need a 3rd party bid management tool for this.  Read more about Adwords Editor here.

Could have been, I tried searching other SEO blogs but came up with a blank on those as well.  I could have sworn it was on the Seomoz blog.  Oh well; thanks for looking!

I thought I remembered reading a post on the Seomoz blog awhile back about how someone worked on the Pimsleur community and grew it through adding content and reviews to their site.  However, I can't seem track it down now, despite my best attempts to Google it.

Does this article exist, or am I taking crazy pills?

No problem Ashley!

It sounds like that would fall under cloaking, albeit pretty benign as far as cloaking goes.  There's some more info here.  The Matt Cutts video on that page has a lot of good information.  Apparently any cloaking is against Google's guidelines.  I would suspect you could get away with it, but I'd be worried everyday about a Google penalty getting handed down.

My sense from what you told me is that canonicals should be working in your case.  What you're trying to use them for is what they're intended to do.  You're sure the syntax is correct, and they're in the of the page or being set in the HTTP header?

Google does set it up so you can sniff out Googlebot and return different content (see here), but that would be unusual to do given the circumstances.  I doubt you'd get penalized for cloaking for redirecting parameterized URLs to canonical ones for only Googlebot, but I'd still be nervous about doing it.

Just curious, is Bing respecting the canonicals?

If these duplicate pages have URLs that are appearing in search results, then the canonicals aren't working or Google just hasn't tried to reindex those pages yet.  If the pages are duplicates, and you've set the canonical correctly, and entered them in Google Webmaster Tools, over time those pages should drop out of the index as Google reindexes them.  You could try submitting a few of these URLs with parameters to Google to reindex manually in Google Webmaster Tools, and see if afterward they disappear from the results pages.  If they do, then it's just a matter of waiting for Googlebot to find them all.

If that doesn't work, you could try something tricky like adding meta noindex tags to the pages with URL parameters, wait until they fall out of the index, and then add canonical tags back on, and see if those pages come back into the SERPs.  If they do, then Google is ignoring your canonical tags.  I hate to temporarily noindex any pages like this... but if they're all appearing separately in the SERPs anyhow, then they're not pooling their link juice properly anyway.

You're doing the right thing by adding canonicals to those pages.  You can also go into Google Webmaster Tools and let them know that those URL parameters don't change the content of the pages.  This really is the bread and butter of canonical tags.  This is the problem they're supposed to solve.

I wouldn't sniff out Googlebot just to 301 those URLs with parameters to the canonical versions.  The canonicals should be sufficient.  If you do want to sniff out Googlebot, Google's directions are here.  You don't do it by user agent, you do a reverse DNS lookup.  Again, I would not do this in your case.

Both Colin and EGOL make great points.  It depends on the niche, and really depends on how much you're willing to put into it.  A lot of goes into keyword selection, bid adjustments, and other optimizations, all covered in the book EGOL recommended.

If you're looking for a good place to start, I'd recommending doing some remarketing campaigns.  If you have lots of goals and audience segmenting set up already in Google Analytics, you can take advantage of those within Adwords.  Read more about that here.

Sure, 10,000 people is enough to run a retargeting campaign.

You might try bringing up the bid to get some more impressions and see how it goes.  100 impressions isn't enough to tell much of anything.  Retargeting does tend to have the highest ROI of any display advertising if you target it properly.  Since the users in your retargeting list are more likely to convert on your site since they've been there before, you can tolerate a higher CPC with retargeting as compared to other display campaigns.

Are you segmenting your retargeting lists into many smaller lists?  You can split your lists into users that have made it further down your conversion funnel, and bid higher the further they've made it down the funnel already (e.g. visited a subscription page and left, or added items to a shopping cart and abandoned it).  If you're using Adwords and Google Analytics, you can do this easily with Google Analytics Remarketing, and retarget any visitors on your site based on things like time on site, pages they've visited, and custom events and goals they've accomplished (or not accomplished).