Ryan Jones Blog – dotCULT.com Ryan Jones Blogs About Internet Culture, Marketing, SEO, & Social Media

The man who played Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert) died today at the age of 90. I remember spending lots of afternoons at my grandparents house watching shows like Mr. Wizard on Nickelodeon.

One of my favorite parts of the show is how he’d have a new assistant all the time. It spawned various jokes (cue the dinosaurs “we’re gonna need another Timmy!”) Looking back, Don and his show were a much larger part of my upbringing than I realized.

Don was responsible for getting many of my generation interested in science, and he will be greatly missed.

Are you the first person that’s ever owned your URL? Do you know how to find out? Why does it matter?

If you’re thinking of registering a new domain name, you might want to see if it was ever registered before. It’s possible that your new name might have been owned by a domainer or a spammer. If so, it can have some pretty bad consequences for your SEO campaigns.

Just ask Marianne Jones (no relation). When she registered her own name as a domain name for her business, she had no idea that it was previously owned by a domainer trying to cash in on the actor with a similar name.

That move was obviously unprofitable so he let it expire and she picked it up. The problem is, while owned by the spammer it managed to get banned from most major search engines.

As we all know, getting re-included in Google can sometimes be a royal pain in the ass.

http://vintagegoodness.com/new-goodness-at-auction-on-ebay-this-week-14/ So what can you do to check your domain name?

First off, I’d suggest heading over to domaintools.com and running a WHOIS on the domain. It’ll tell you if it’s ever been registered before. If it is, search for the domain name and see what comes up.

You might also want to visit archive.org and see what used to be there before you owned it. This won’t work with all sites, but it will with some. dotCULT has a very rich history there if you’re bored.

Once you’ve got it up and hosted, you can also visit my ip neighbors and see if you happen to share an IP with any spammy sites. If you do, you might request that your host issue you a different IP address. While there’s no proof that sharing an IP with a spammy site hurts you, it also won’t hurt to be free of it.

so should you avoid previously owned domain names? No, not at all. In Marianne’s case it made sense to register her own name. Why would she not? Just be prepared to deal with the hassle of trying to get re-listed once you acquire such a name.

If you’re interested in learning how to get re-included into search engines you can find some more information here and here.

UPDATE: As of 6-12 Marianne’s website has started showing up again in Google. It took about 1 week from the time we submitted a re-inclusion request for this to happen.

The other day at work we came upon an interesting question. Do using symbols like ®, ™, and © affect your SEO ratings?

It’s an interesting question. In other words, will searching for “coke” vs “coke®” yield different results.

It turns out they don’t. As we expected, Google simply drops the symbols in the name. They’re probably taking them out because they’re assuming most users can’t type them into a search engine.

Sadly, this issue arose while trying to do a search to see if more people used the ® mark vs not using it on certain registered terms. I’m still uncertain if it has to be used in every instance or if it’s just ok to use it once or mention it at the bottom of a page. If anybody knows the official rules on this please let me know.

Similarly, it’s also impossible to use a current search engine to see the amount of results for “Internet” compared to “internet” (anybody who knows me knows I’m totally against capitalizing words like internet and web)

If you know how to do searches that care about case please let me know… I’d really like to see the answer.

By now you’ve probably seen the news about the dangers of sodium benzoate (a chemical commonly found in diet cola.)

The fear mongering ranges from cancer causing to DNA damaging. But is it legit?

Personally, I think it’s all bullshit. If you look closely you’ll see that the amount of sodium benzoate in an apple is far higher than the FDA approved amount in cola.

Are they suggesting that we stop eating apples?

Maybe that’s why God forbid Adam and Eve to eat the apples from tree of knowledge (which probably weren’t even apples but pomegranates)

Yahoo announced today on their search marketing blog that click charges may be based on “quality of traffic.”

The announcement sounds good for advertisers, but is it good for publishers? That depends on how they judge quality of traffic.

The Yahoo blog defines quality as:

“Quality” is calculated based on conversion rates and other measurements of the ability of our partner’s sites to deliver more interested, valuable customers to you

Again this sounds really great for advertisers, but not for content producers. Here’s why:

Up until now, everything that determined how much you got paid was up to the content producer. As somebody who runs sites that show ads I could choose what to write about (thus choosing the keywords for the ads to be based on). I could also choose where to put the ads, how many, the color scheme, etc. The more clicks I got the more money I made.

That’s not to say I cheated the system. Yahoo has many policies intact to prevent people from enticing users to click ads, and I follow them all. Ads aren’t just a way to make money; they’re a service to your users as well. If your users find themselves tricked into clicking irrelevant ads they’re not very likely to return to your site.

What I don’t like about this program is that the “quality” takes control away from me. Not only that, it’s ambiguous.

There are many things that can determine conversions. Suppose for a minute that I’m showing ads for a loan application site. Upon clicking the ad the user finds that the site is asking for their social security number but isn’t using SSL. Most likely they’re not going to fill out the application – and I’m not going to be paid for that click. My user wanted a loan, but the landing page didn’t do a good job of letting them convert. That’s not my fault and I should be paid accordingly.

Here’s another example: Earlier today I clicked on an ad for “hassle free ring tones” The landing page however didn’t show me any ring tones. It only offered some more ads for ring tone companies. Since I didn’t immediately see ring tones on the landing page, I left and went somewhere else. This type of page isn’t going to convert well. It’s common knowledge that ad landing pages should have the product that the ad is advertising.

With the old program, I got paid the same amount whether or not the user did anything. After all, I delivered a targeted customer; it’s your job to get them to buy.

The new system doesn’t work this way. Somehow I (the publisher) am supposed to get my users to buy (despite how crappy your landing pages are) without somehow enticing them to do so.

It’ll be interesting to see if any publishers jump ship for competitors like Adsense or Azoogle. What are your opinions?

In the last post, Avery made a comment about me moving to Canada. I’m not. I’m simply in Toronto for a hockey tournament. I don’t think I could live here.

For those of you familiar with Detroit… Imagine Detroit but with a few million more people. Heck, I don’t even think Detroit has 1 million anymore. Toronto has over 2.5 million.
I stayed in Mississagua… which is like the local town of Taylor but with over 1 million people.

I was lucky enough to be here during a smog alert. If you haven’t experienced smog it’s like a grey cloud that stinks and limits visibility. I was less than 1/2 mile from the CN tower (the world’s tallest building) and I still couldn’t see it. That’s how bad the smog was.

What surprised me the most though was how expensive things have gotten. I remember when you could exchange $100 American for almost $150 Canadian.

Now that same $100 will get you $105 Canadian. It still sounds like a good deal – until you realize that prices haven’t been updated to reflect the actual value of the Canadian dollar.

A 5 piece nugget at Wendys, for example, cost me $1.29. After taxes and exchange rate (which are much higher) I paid 25 cents more than I would in the states.

A coke in a vending machine ($1.25 here) was $2 in Canada. Again, I paid well over 50 cents more than I should have for that Coke.

All of these little things add up. My $100 hotel room came to $119 after taxes. (compared to $106 in the US) Some of you may say that you can get your taxes back at the border, but I asked at the border and they said they discontinued that policy.

So while I enjoy being able to go to non smoking bars and play against top hockey competition, I don’t think I could afford to live in Canada.