Jane Copland Latest search engine news blog articles from Jane Copland. http://www.seocentro.com/seo-archives/author/Jane+Copland.html Jane Copland News Archive http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=13208 Posted by Jane Copland I always feel the need to reintroduce myself after an extended period away from the blog. I'm Jane and I work here. For the last three weeks, I've done a lot of traveling and attended three vastly different conferences in London and Las Vegas. You may have heard of one of them a little more than you'd have liked to . Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:12:05 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=12351 Posted by Jane Copland This is an older topic, but one which is still worth discussing: what is the best way to investigate linkbait, viral or other content-based link building efforts in "boring" industries? How best to find out what worked in the past? How best to find out what didn't work? We have a range of tools at our disposal when it comes to content-based link building research. You've heard of all of them, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:43:53 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=12114 Posted by Jane Copland When Facebook recently revamped its website, widening and dividing its pages into tabs, its staff probably foresaw the initial outcry. Redesign rage is pretty common, and most sites receive some negative feedback when they change things on a large scale. SEOmoz has received an uncommonly high number of positive comments every time we've redesigned, but we still have to filter the feedback and figure out what works and what doesn't. Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 15 Oct 2008 19:24:00 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=11890 Posted by Jane Copland Name the number one criticism of linkbait: from a technical point of view, the top problem with popular content is that it often doesn't attract many links. "Linkbait" has become a word we use to mean pretty much anything that gets media attention, no matter whether it is heavily linked to or not. In fact, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 08 Oct 2008 21:57:23 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=11634 Posted by Jane Copland Yesterday afternoon, as I was at home recovering from a form of black death known as the common head cold, I came across Danny Sullivan's piece on Search Engine Land about his dealings with a lazy link broker . I recommend reading Danny's post, which details how he questioned a person who wanted a link on the Sphinn.com homepage with the anchor text "search engine optimisation." The person represented a UK-based SEO firm. Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:52:55 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=11420 Posted by Jane Copland Whoa! It's Jane! Yes, SEOmozzers, your regular Roundup Thursday schedule will resume next week when Rebecca gets back from a half-ironman competition in Mexico . Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: If you have a problem with seeing people dressed as Lyrca-bodysuited butterflies, I suggest not viewing the Search Engine Rap Battle videos . They're awful. It's wonderful. I personally think that Yahoo! Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:04:58 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=11336 Posted by Jane Copland What's the deal with all this advice that Google employees like to give us, then? Of all the search engines (and of many companies of Google's size and scope), Google appears to be the most open with its distribution of information, its interactions with its users and its willingness to give us advice. The other search engines are catching up, but Google has always seemed to lead the way in its interactions with the public, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:18:38 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=11099 Posted by Jane Copland I don't need to spend much time explaining what meme marketing is. A meme is born, defined in its traditional sense here , and someone (not necessarily its inventor) uses its popularity to push a commercial interest. Memes are horribly annoying when overdone, and every single one of them has its share of people who can't stand it. A good meme marketer doesn't care about search results like this : their website is a story in success due to a simple idea. Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Thu, 18 Sep 2008 06:00:45 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=10832 Posted by Jane Copland There are a number of uses for URL shorteners, some less upstanding than others, but I had begun to wonder what drew people to those services that are the most popular. Undeniably, TinyURL is the most visible URL shortener, used extensively in social media, but it seems to derive its popularity mainly from being one of the oldest services in the niche. As is usually the case when something becomes popular, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:43:46 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=10636 Posted by Jane Copland Most of us are pretty good spotting shady SEO outfits. At the least, if someone practices enough SEO and reads enough good resources, they're aware that a company promising to have a site atop one-hundred major search engines in forty-eight hours is lying. That sort of shtick is the most obvious giveaway of a crook, but have you ever noticed how much meaningless advice passes for expert content? Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Fri, 05 Sep 2008 04:15:22 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=10575 Posted by Jane Copland As promised last week and earlier today via our Twitter account , we have a new PRO guide to release today. Written by Darren Slatten , The Professional's Guide to PageRank Optimization is a fantastic resource on both the theory and mathematics behind PageRank, and on how SEOs can efficiently practice PageRank sculpting. I was impressed with this guide and think it's an important document. Answering a lot of Q&A, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Thu, 04 Sep 2008 01:19:16 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=10319 Posted by Jane Copland The Internet, as fragile, infuriating and enigmatic as its features can be, certainly does some things that I'd really like to see implemented, at least for beta testing, in real life. I am not a programmer, so this is piecemealed together from things I do know... but in my ideal world, I'd be able to solve most of my problems with a couple of simple instructions and a hard refresh. 1. Redirecting phone numbers. Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:16:02 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=10164 Posted by Jane Copland Many of you have probably set your SEOmoz account settings such that when you comment on a blog post, we email you whenever someone adds a new comment. One thing we don't do is include the contents of the new comment in the notification email. Why not? Because then you would have less reason to click through to see the comment in its natural habitat and you'd be less likely to reply. The same goes for SEOmoz private messages and replies to Q&A questions. Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:57:48 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=9337 Posted by Jane Copland There is a very large group of vocal, active members on SEOmoz whom we hardly ever see on the blog. Most of them rarely write YOUmoz posts. They comment infrequently. However, they spend a lot of time in the same area of the site where I spend the majority of my time: SEO Q&A . Questions range from very simple and easy to answer to incredibly complex. Questions that I can't answer usually end up being assigned to Rand or to one of our developers. Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:08:56 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=9007 Posted by Jane Copland SEOmoz is pretty lucky when it comes to blog comments in that we receive a lot of them. By most blog's standards, our regular count of between twenty and sixty comments is quite enviable, trounced by the likes of Techcrunch but highly competitive in this industry. We also keep a relatively good record of the comments our members make and how well received those comments are via Mozpoints and the record of recent comments we keep on everyone's profile. Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:41:46 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=8744 Posted by Jane Copland Reputation management problems are delicate enough when a company or an individual discovers negative press in search results for its name or common keywords. The situation becomes even worse when undesirable results are not the work of a disgruntled person writing about another, but of someone pretending to be the other person. With the growth of social media and, specifically, social networking, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:10:18 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=8480 Posted by Jane Copland Quite often, people ask me this, either to my face, via Q&A or in emails: how do I come up with truly unique, never-before-seen, shiny new ideas? What a question. It's a rare thing to come up with something that's really never been done before. Many of the novels on a bookstore's shelves contain stories that have been told before in one form or another. Real originality is fantastic, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:11:10 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=8179 Posted by Jane Copland The first time I ever accessed the Internet was from my mother's work computer in late 1995. I was eleven years old and her homepage was set to Yahoo. I can't really remember what it looked like, but Googling (oh, I hate the irony too) "Yahoo in 1995" produced a post by John Battelle with a magnificent screen cap of the portal in the mid-90s . This was thirteen years ago (so, over half my lifetime), and my memory might not be serving me very well, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:52:11 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=7953 Posted by Jane Copland This morning, I was talking to Rob Kerry about some particularly competitive search phrases and looking around in the SERPs. We'd gone through most of the usual suspects when [ cheap flights ] came up. Google duly returned its top ten, and at the bottom, I noticed farecast.live.com . The first thing I noticed was the unfortunate title tag and snippet. However, things got stranger when I clicked through to the site. Before I go on, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:18:46 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=7613 Posted by Jane Copland I've recently purchased my first BlackBerry phone, and I've thus been introduced to the joys of a truly mobile Internet. There is a big difference between composing all-lower-case, badly punctuated emails on one of these horrific pieces of rubbish and using a phone that was actually designed with the Internet in mind. However, I've also had the displeasure of visiting sites that aren't designed with mobile phones in mind. Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:56:35 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=7433 Posted by Jane Copland Many of you saw this post from seoco.co.uk this morning (or its Sphinn thread ) about our Web 2.0 Awards being removed from Google's index. We noticed the same thing late last night and spent some time this morning going through what could have happened. Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:39:22 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=7311 Posted by Jane Copland There is plenty to read about social media online, but rarely do I come across something that I find really interesting or even particularly believable. On any given day, you can wade through a mass of blog posts and articles about new tools with which to waste time on Twitter. I know how to waste time on Twitter. I do it all the time. It has been quite a while since I read something I found really interesting about social media. It seems like a clean, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:03:24 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=7114 Posted by Jane Copland I always find it difficult to begin conference recaps. To me, they always sound trite. They're the high school English class equivalent of the forced short stories that begin, "We packed up the car to go to the beach..." Thus, my complaining about beginning conference recaps is how I've chosen to start this one. Luckily, there is plenty to talk about from SMX Advanced, and not all of the good stories originate at the Edgewater Hotel's bar. Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Sun, 08 Jun 2008 11:04:35 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=6786 Posted by Jane Copland Using Twitter over the past week or so has been a very frustrating experience. The site takes a long time to load, its features either intermittently or permanently don't work, updates get lost and, due to the site's miserable uptime, its third party applications don't work either. For a time, every second person's update complained about Twitter's uptime (or lack thereof) and some suggested a mutiny. Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Thu, 29 May 2008 01:27:46 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=6715 Posted by Jane Copland To quote our fantastic CTO Jeff Pollard, we're live . 2008's Web 2.0 Awards are finally complete . Two years after SEOmoz's first Web 2.0 Awards launched, we've finished compiling, ranking and awarding hundreds of websites across forty-one categories. We've added new categories and removed outdated ones. We've also again teamed with a great group of bloggers, marketers, and web-based business people who acted as our voting panel. Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Tue, 27 May 2008 20:13:15 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=6680 Posted by Jane Copland We work in an industry where everyone can link. It's very tough to find one SEO, or one person who's interested in SEO, who doesn't have a website of some sort. Many of us have more than one: a work-related domain and a personal or hobby site. None of us lacks the ability to link. Thus, it seems we sometimes forget that not all industries are like ours. Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Tue, 27 May 2008 06:34:06 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=6590 Posted by Jane Copland I know it's hard to believe. I'm doing the Thursday round up. Rebecca has left town for Memorial Day weekend and thus it's fallen to me to get together this week's links. When she says it's more time consuming than it seems, she isn't lying. Three star links: The Guardian's Victor Keegan discusses the fallacy that Google is unbeatable , however he makes some points I don't agree with, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Fri, 23 May 2008 00:42:53 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=6498 Posted by Jane Copland If you take any interest in Sphinn and the debates that rage therein, you properly noticed last week's uproar over linkbait specialist Lyndon Antcliff's fake story that ended up being mentioned on Fox News. We've dabbled in a fair few linkbait projects over the years and since the Sphinn discussion was still alive just two days ago, I don't think it's too late to mention it again. Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 21 May 2008 15:40:22 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=6174 Posted by Jane Copland I don't often get indignant about websites. Even bad ones. Sometimes I complain about what passes for Web 2.0 genius , but I have a problem with one particular site I've come across lately. I find Spock.com vaguely appalling. Spock is a social networking / people search site which allows anyone to edit anybody else's information. If you find that you've been added to the site, you can claim your profile and change your information. However, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 14 May 2008 13:44:17 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=5889 Posted by Jane Copland I apologise for another Facebook-centred post, but something interesting happened to me this week. I also realise that it is a bit strange to title an original post, "The Revised Edition," but this is indeed a complete re-write of my first draft. My initial post was titled, "Cusomter Service Protocol 101: Threaten To Ban Your Most Loyal Users" and it was quite the diatribe. You see, on Monday Facebook threatened to ban me. Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 07 May 2008 17:37:57 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=5580 Posted by Jane Copland If I had been paying attention on April 15th, instead of swanning around New Zealand, I would have noticed that Facebook had launched what amounts to an elementary keyword research tool ... and as I write that, I realise that Facebook Lexicon is perhaps less elementary than some of the tools that we already pay for. An anonymous aggregation of "public and semi-public" keywords from across the site, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:40:11 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=5467 Posted by Jane Copland I may be totally wrong on this, or maybe I've overlooked some obvious explanation as to why some content on the end of nofollowed SEOmoz comment links has been indexed and ranked. Puzzling over this by myself and with friends hasn't produced any good conclusions, so I thought I'd throw this out there to the community. Nutshell: periodically, I'll search for my own name in search engines. If you say you've never done this, you're a liar. Everyone has. Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:17:24 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=5347 Posted by Jane Copland This past Tuesday night (and, eventually, Wednesday morning), Rand and I sat down and "wrote" a post that we were quite sure was rather amusing. Admittedly, posting to a widely read SEO blog after getting little sleep and consuming three beers and two cocktails isn't advisable. We were, however, relatively sure that we were on to something good. It turns out that we weren't just tired and somewhat drunk . Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:08:19 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=5252 Posted by Jane Copland Google has some fantastic OneBox results. We've all seen most of them: the answer to important queries such as "number of horns on a unicorn" and "what is the answer to life the universe and everything" , in addition to more sensible results, like accurate information as to " what time is it in Sydney ?" However, we feel that Google has neglected to include some important information in its OneBox offerings. As such, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:32:16 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=5088 Posted by Jane Copland Hello, SEOmoz readers. My name is Jane and I work here. You may remember me from posts that were written about two weeks ago. I've been pretty quiet recently (the Moz Points are suffering) because I've been at the first SMX show in Australia . Rand already wrote about the show , but I thought I'd provide a bit of "overheard" fun as well. At the moment, we are waiting at Auckland airport. At the moment, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:34:31 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=4300 Posted by Jane Copland At any given time, our Q&A section usually features a question or two about image optimisation. People want to know why their images haven't been indexed or aren't appearing for their key terms, even after they have added keywords to every imaginable attribute. Appropriate anchor text, nearby-keywords and relevant surrounding content don't seem to have made a difference. The images don't show up. In their place, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:31:07 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=3952 Posted by Jane Copland I don't watch much television. It's silly really. I bought a big flat screen HDTV DVR OMG WTF television before I could really afford such things and I only regularly watch two shows. Tonight, one of my two shows will go off air for the last time, leaving me with only American Idol, which I encourage you all to link to from now on as American Idle (and also to check out American Idol's SEO lookalike ). Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:20:59 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=3644 Posted by Jane Copland Like most SEOs I know, I have a couple of sites that act as my side projects. They aren't monetised and I plan to keep them that way: I like to keep an eye on them for the purpose of experiments. By this, I mean that I like to mess around with them and if one of them drops completely from every search engine, loses all of its PageRank and its server catches fire, it doesn't matter all that much. Given the experimental nature of the sites in question, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:54:17 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=3271 Posted by Jane Copland Caught during a moment of extreme moral ineptitude on Saturday, I did the unthinkable. I signed up to Twitter. I felt like a fourteen seventeen year old who's been thinking about sneaking into her parents' booze cabinet with her friends and finally makes the decision to pick the lock. I also felt bad immediately, especially given this and this . I didn't try to convince myself that I'd signed up in order to keep ahead of the world's breaking news, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 12 Mar 2008 13:13:47 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=2831 Posted by Jane Copland I remember the first time I heard about someone ending a relationship via email. It was a long time ago (like, in the nineties ) and possibly in the days before I had an email account of my own. Everyone was shocked at how someone could bring themselves to do something like that online. Now, such a break-up would constitute a gross lack of inventiveness. Why not edit a Wikipedia entry instead ? Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 05 Mar 2008 07:50:00 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=2555 Posted by Jane Copland I'm actually serious with the title here. This session was great. Honestly, I've been to more informative sessions here at SMX West than I've been to since Pubcon 2006, where I knew nothing about SEO and everything I heard was new. Unraveling URLs & Demystifying Domains had some good speakers who each provided unique information about the subject. I realise that conference recaps aren't usually the most exciting genre of blog posts, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Thu, 28 Feb 2008 02:39:15 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=2407 Posted by Jane Copland If there's one thing that doesn't seem to receive terribly much attention, it's image and video search. There has usually been a session at every conference, but images were often ignored in favour of both paid and regular organic search. Along came blended results and suddenly everybody takes more notice. According to the Video, Images and Blended Results session, image search only accounts for 7 - 15% of all search engine activity, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Wed, 27 Feb 2008 02:46:32 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=2040 Posted by Jane Copland "Avoid tricks," Google says, "intended to improve search engine rankings." Of course, they don't mean it, or else we'd all be out of a job. When we explain what we do to people, we tend to use words like "tactics," "methods," and "strategies." The Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo is currently taking place in London. Search Engine Tricks wouldn't sound so legitimate, would it? In fact, it sounds kind of fun, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Thu, 21 Feb 2008 01:54:55 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=1680 Posted by Jane Copland There is absolutely nothing wrong with making up new words for something that, as it stands, can't be properly named or described with existing language. Quite simply, this is how languages evolve and grow, and it would be next to impossible to name everything with words that already exist. However, there should be a reason behind naming, coinage and the general invention of new words. On top of that, Search Engines News SEO News Jane Copland Jane Copland Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:52:27 GMT