Not sure I understand what you mean by links. If your site's pages are indexed you can use Google search console removals tool as well as your robots. Otherwise if it's links from another site that are spammy, use disavow tool

Does anyone tend to find their search campaign going over their daily budget?

I've set a daily budget of $5 and on day 3, total spend is already more than 3 times this. 2 additional clicks have shot the budget and CPC up.

Is this normal?

A reasonably relevant, reasonably good authority website has linked to my website, but rather than directly linking to my site via like the below:

<a href="mysite.com">my text</a>

They have linked to a page on their own site called "click" which carries URL parameters, one of which contains my site URL, for then onward redirect

<a href="their-site.com/click?link=mysite.com">my text</a>

What they're doing is they're using this link as a method of tracking outbound links and identifying where visitors are going to exit their site.

But are these links still recognised and pass authority? Or is all of the authority getting stopped at their "/click" page?

Physically on-page, my URL doesn't exist - it only exists in the passed parameters of that link. Is this still beneficial for passing authority?

Semrush is a very helpful tool for keyword research. It does cost money but it gives you what you are looking for, including:

• Keyword difficulty - how hard it is to rank for a term
• Variations of that term and their difficulty
• Competition level of selected term
• Volume of searches of that term on average

For example if I were looking to promote SEO businesses to buy, i'd put SEO businesses in the Semrush keyword analyser and i'd get variations of those terms.

Then i'd use those terms in my content on page to help my content rank for those terms.

There are quite a few handy tools out there that can help you with your keyword research, but most do unfortunately cost money.

Content should be your main priority. Build out your website and pages with a good 800+ words on each page written well all about your niche. Then check out

https://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors

which lists lots of ranking factors. It might just be rubbish, but even still, there is a lot of stuff on there that can contribute to better rankings. For now though,

• Make sure you have a sitemap
• Make sure you have good page user experience and core web vitals
• Create fresh, unique content around your niche and target search term variations
• Link between your pages on varied anchor texts and keyword variations
• Don't keyword stuff your pages
• Make sure you have social media pages and post regularly there too

Getting visibility in search engines will take a lot of time and optimisation and you'll probably need some relevant backlinks too.

If the ads are of no value, why not just remove them? Even if they're noindex, they'll still use your crawl budget because Google has to crawl the page in order to learn that it is noindex in the first place. Obviously adding millions of URLs to a robots file is not viable.

A good content length would be between 800 - 1400 words, with plenty of variations in your target search terms. Is your new content shorter than your old content? Is it less rich? Maybe you can salvage some parts of the old content to help boost up the value of the new content?

Plugins that optimise your CSS and Javascript do not usually make changes directly to the file. Instead they minify and combine into a separate plugin specific file. So if you disable the WP-optimise plugin, your changes will be reversed and the optimisation will no longer be present.

Your image optimisation might not be affected, depends on your settings whether they have overwritten the original image or not.