Mini-Review: Stomping the Search Engines 2 is being released on 4th September 2008. The package comes with 2 DVDs, one the original Stomping course, the second the new and improved Stomping the Search engines 2 course. As art of the deal, you’ll be getting their new magazine – the “Net Effect” with the course.

The original Stomping the Search Engines was an audio course, but a very good one.  The new Stomping the Search Engines 2 is a video course that is divided into 7 modules (and 36 videos), created by some of the industries biggest names.  Jerry West (exceptional SEO), Andy Jenkins, Sherman Hu, Dan Thies, Leslie Rhode, Don Crowther, Brad Fallon and others.

The videos are all well done, and cover a huge array of information including:

• Spam & Deception
• Short Term Strategies: Low-Value Sites
• Aggressive White Hat
• How Search Engines Work
• Understanding the SERPs
• Search Engine Crawling
• Search Engine Ranking Recipes
• Keyword Strategy Concepts
• Keyword Research & Discovery
• Mapping Keywords to Content
• Competitive Research
• Site Structure Concepts
• Designing for Crawlability
• Anchor Text & Link Reputation
• Canonicalization & Duplicate Content
• Using Redirects
• Improving Your Indexing
• On Page SEO
• Optimizing Page Structure
• Get Your BODY In Shape
• Creating Unique Content
• Robots.txt Tutorial
• Link Building Concepts
• Vertical & General Directories
• Link Targets & Link Bait
• Marketing & Promotion
• Improving Results,
• a lot more…

How good is Stomping the Search Engines 2?

The guys who created this course run the very successful, high-ticket Stomper Net facility (members pay $800 a month).  They therefore have thousands of Stomper sites to refer to in there testing, so the information should be good.  Added to that the quality of the staff that they employ, and Stomping the Search Engines 2 is without doubt the best SEO guide I have seen to date.  This course was originally created as a $497 ticket item, but they are giving it away for free in the hope you will subscribe to their excellent Net Effect magazine.

This DVD will not only teach you SEO, but will answer a lot of the questions you may have based on weird stuff you have seen happen to your own sites.

The Net Effect Magazine I saw was a pre-production version, but I can promise you that you wont be disappointed by it.  Exerts like Jerry West (SEO guru), Leslie Rhode (who I know as the “links guy” after using his amazing Optilink tools), Andy Jenkins, Sherman Hu (the “Wordpress” guy) and a whole stack of others, all contribute articles to the magazine, and the content really is a very high quality as you can imagine.

I cannot help but give this course my full recommendation.  If you want to learn SEO from the masters, get Stomping the Search Engines 2 .

OK, so what’s all this about thin affiliates?

In a “leaked” document reportedly coming from Google, the big G gave guidelines to human spam-busters on how to classify affiliate sites as thin or not.

A “thin affiliate” is basically one that creates pages with the sole intention of ranking well and directing traffic to an affiliated merchant site, without adding anything unique to the World Wide Web.

It seems that the algorithms at Google HQ are no longer the only ranking factors involved in where your pages end up in the search results.  Now, human beings are scouring the Internet looking for sites to penalise.

Here is the report:

http://www.searchbistro.com/spamguide.doc

(If you get asked for a username and password, just cancel twice, and the document should show up).