The Real Ryan J. Parker

Is it just me, or is Google AdWords quality score really just a way for Google to demand people pay a higher price for clicks while they can hide behind a veil of “sorry, your quality score just isn’t high enough”?

Since last month I’ve been running an AdWords campaign for Which Team Wins?, and every couple of weeks I notice some keywords going inactive for search because they’re now priced higher, while quality scores go from Great to OK to (in some cases) Poor.

I’m still pretty new to the AdWords game, but based on a little Googling the only thing I can find is people having the same problem.

My pages are exactly relevant to the keywords I’m targeting, as I want to send people looking for Dallas Mavs stats to the Dallas Mavericks Stats page, but Google doesn’t think the quality is good enough (meaning it’s not relevant to the user).

This is a bit absurd, and I’m going to research more into this problem when I have the time, but for now some keywords are going to stay inactive. In my case I get a strong feeling of price gouging, and I don’t like it.

If you’ve had good or bad experiences with Google’s quality score I’d like to hear what you think, along with any ideas as to why my score for some pages keeps dropping.

Tags: google, adwords, quality score

Is Microsoft checking to see if your website contains perverse content by using unsavory search strings?

It sure seems so.

While running a quick check through my websites’ access logs this morning I came across an interesting line in the access log of a website I’m slowly developing:

131.107.0.95 - - [17/Mar/2007:10:45:07 -0400] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 13016 “http://search.live.com/result.aspx?q=cumshot&mrt=en-us&FORM=LVSP” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; Win64; x64; SV1)”

If you’re having a hard time deciphering this line, here’s what it says: someone accessed my website using a referrer from Microsoft’s live.com using the query string of cumshot. What’s interesting to note, however, is that the referrer line is invalid, as the live.com search application isn’t result.aspx, it’s results.aspx.

Let me first say that I’ve seen websites request pages with their own website’s URL as the referrer string to try and get people to visit their website, but this is obviously not one of those cases as it sends me to live.com, not somerandompornsite.com.

Having no idea how someone would find Probability Calculators by searching for cumshot, I decided to dig a little deeper to see what was going on.

Doing a lookup on the IP address, 131.107.0.95, I get:

nslookup 131.107.0.95 ns1.msft.net
Server: ns1.msft.net
Address: 207.68.160.190#53

95.0.107.131.in-addr.arpa name = tide525.microsoft.com.

If you’ve never done an nslookup before, it’s basically saying that this IP address belongs to Microsoft, and Microsoft is giving me the authoritative answer.

Doing a reverse lookup on tide525.microsoft.com yields the same IP address, so it’s a good match.

Now the only question left is: Why?

Why is Microsoft doing this? Some websites take the searcher’s query string to provide targeted content to the user, but why is Microsoft checking for this query string? Is it really that hard to determine if a site is targeted to an adult audience?

To be honest, I’ve got no problem with unsavory search strings, but I doubt everyone feels the same way as I do, so I wanted to write this post. Have you seen this in your own access logs? Do you even care that Microsoft is doing this?

Let me know what you think.

Tags: microsoft, live search, live.com, unsavry, referrer, search, string

This isn’t something blogs do all that often, but ever since I saw how JohnTP separates his pingbacks and trackbacks from his regular comments I’ve wanted to take the time to figure out just how to do that myself.

From the user’s perspective, separating pingbacks and trackbacks provides a nice, clean look that doesn’t break up the flow of reader comments. As such, I hope every blog seriously considers separating pingbacks and trackbacks from regular comments. If you’re still having doubts I’d like to make the choice easier for you: the steps below show you how to separate comments from pingbacks and trackbacks.

First, you will need to modify the comments loop in your template’s comments.php file and add the following code:

This will make the $comment_type variable available so that you can place an if () statement to determine if the comment is a comment, pingback, or trackback.

Next, you’ll need to add an if () statement inside of your comments loop so that only normal comments are shown. To do this you’ll need to wrap all of the code inside of the comments loop between:

and

Now that you’re only showing normal comments, you’ll need to make a copy of your comments loop so that you now have two comment loops, one right after the other. The only change you’ll need to make in the second loop is to change:

to

Now all you have to do is style the second loop to your liking. For my template I stripped out the excerpt text and added the following code to print out an appropriate indicator for pingbacks and trackbacks:

<?php
if ($comment_type == 'pingback') {
    echo "Pingback";
} else if ($comment_type == 'trackback') {
    echo "Trackback";
}
?>

Now that you know how to separate your regular comments from pingbacks and trackbacks what are you waiting on? Go separate them already!

Tags: wordpress, separate, comments, pingbacks, trackbacks, comments.php

If you’re looking to get content ideas for your website consider using SEO Book’s Keyword Suggestion Tool as a starting point.

If you’re not familiar with this tool, it provides a list of related keyword phrases to a keyword phrase you enter, and its primary target is for people trying to find keyword phrases to use in a PPC advertising campaign.

PPC advertising campaigns, however, aren’t the only applications this tool can be used for. By entering your own website’s keyword phrases you can find other keyword phrases people are searching for that will help you come up with content ideas that might be beneficial to have on your website.

Depending on how competitive the market is for some of the keyword phrases, you can potentially attract a lot of free traffic if you can fill a void in information people are looking for.

I’ve used this tool to add to my roadmap for implementing more related content at Which Team Wins?, as I’m currently in a competitive keyword nightmare. Adding some not so competitive content that people are looking for should help the website from a SEO perspective.

I’m interested in hearing if anyone else has had much success using a keyword suggestion tool like this one to come up with content ideas for your website, and I’m also interested in hearing about any success you may have found with it.

Tags: seo book, keyword suggestion tool, content ideas

I’m going to share with you something I do when working on my websites that I hope you can apply to your own website development and growth.

This isn’t some special website design or a neat coding trick, but rather it’s a way of looking at the hard work you’re doing and making sure it’s going to prove worthwhile over the long haul.

All you have to do is ask yourself this simple question when building new content for your website: Is this something that’s unique?

If you answer yes to this question then your organic growth will be much better than if you answer no.

If you’ve ever tried to build a website in a highly competitive market then you know it’s very hard to do without spending a lot of money to drive traffic to your website. These are the types of websites that typically answer no to this question, and they’re hard to organically build a sound user base.

You can use this question to help you focus on the pieces of your website in which you answer yes to. There will be times in which you need to incorporate some necessary pieces that aren’t unique, but by focusing on the unique pieces you can expect your website to grow much faster than it would otherwise.

A majority of people on the web visit your website for the information it provides, and if you don’t have something unique then they’ll find their way to someone else’s website.

This is something that shows itself in two websites I’m currently developing:

The first website, Which Team Wins?, does not get much organic traffic at the moment because a majority of the content I have on the website isn’t all that unique. This will change as I build something worth visiting, but if you’ve got a website that requires you to lay a foundation without unique content then to get traffic in the early stages you’ll need to advertise because not much organic traffic will be sent your way.

The second website, Probability Calculators, isn’t as old, and it doesn’t have any working probability calculators at the moment. It does, however, get three times the organic traffic that Which Team Wins? does. Why? Because the content is unique.

The same holds true for other websites I work on, and I’m sure it does for your websites, too.

If you’re stuck in a rut and are running out of ideas as to how you can generate traffic to your website then try coming up with some content and see if they pass the Is this something that’s unique? test. If they do then build them in and patiently wait as the organic traffic slowly starts to build!