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?

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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,

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,

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,

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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,