Interview with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz

Our guest for this weeks interview is Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz fame. Rand has acclaimed a significant role in the search world and has risen to become one of the leading figureheads within the SEO community. So, without anymore “pillow-talk”, lets get this interview started.

Paul: Hi Rand, 2007 has certainly been an eventful year for yourself, what with your proposal to long term girlfriend “Mystery Guest” and SEOMOZ continually hitting the headlines. How do you feel within yourself as to how the year has shaped out?

Rand: Hmm… within myself… I don’t know that I’ve really had time to reflect on the last 4 years, never mind 2007. It’s been a roller coaster in so many ways. I suppose I feel excited, a bit nervous, very grateful to have so many good people in my life and around me, personally and professionally. I feel a little overwhelmed sometimes, but in a good way.

Paul: Your position allows you to meet all sorts of people, from all walks of life. Whom would you say has been the most influential and why?

Rand: That’s a very tough call. I think I’d be hard pressed to say anything other than my mother, Gillian, who’s also SEOmoz’s cofounder. Along with raising me, she helped to build the business and helped to transform us into what we are today. Being raised by an entrepreneur, it’s no surprise I am where I am today.

Paul: I read recently that you turned down a 10 million dollar search marketing contract to a gambling site. I understood your reasonings as to why you shunned the deal to help focus on building SEOMOZ but do you ever find yourself waking up during the night and thinking “Jeez, I just snubbed 10 Million Dollars”?

Rand: Nah - I think there have plenty of other decisions I’ve thought about or struggled with far more than that one. The reporters who heard the story really blew it out of proportion (in my opinion). The deal was - build a white hat site with top 5 rankings for terms like “online poker” and “texas hold ‘em” and we’ll pay $10 million. That means all the work is upfront, and all the pay only comes when you’ve achieved success. Not only that, but you have to literally bring a knife to a gunfight - competing against spammers and black hats with only your white hat on. It was very easy to say no.

Paul: I appreciate the blog posts you release over at the Mozplex. The majority being high quality informative pieces but some of your posts have carried controversy recently. Are you aware, Rand, before you hit that “publish” button, the reaction from the community that specific posts might receive?

Rand: Actually, I’m generally terrible at predicting what will and won’t cause controversy. I’ve had posts that I’m really worried about get almost no reaction whatsoever and a couple that I thought were nothing remarkable at the time get serious negative attention. To be honest, I’m usually hitting that publish button around 1-2am in the morning, after getting through the rest of my work and I’m fairly sure that sometimes affects my judgment (particularly when I’m traveling or recovering from travel). The most frustrating part, though, is that every time there’s “controversy” on the blog, two odd things happen.

First, blog posts appear both supporting and denouncing my writing - this raises tough questions like, who’s judgment should I trust? Should I shy away from controversy or continue to be open, honest and unafraid to tackle any topic that comes up (even if it means I might make mistakes)? If I apologize for the actions or modify the posts, do I cause even more problems (by making the detractors believe they were right all along and making the supporters feel betrayed)?

Second, a lot of folks in the search marketing community make the assumption that the post was done for linkbait or press, when in fact, that’s got nothing to do with it. We get far more links and positive value out of a good post explaining keyword cannibalization or title tag optimization or viral content strategies than we do out of perceived negative or controversial blog posts. The last time we had a big controversy over my StumbleUpon screenshots outing link sellers, this exact assumption was implied in blog posts, comments and emails, yet if you look at our analytics, that was one of our worst-performing posts that week in terms of CTR from the feed, links earned and visits. It’s just a passionate community of participants who love drama. To be honest, though, I can’t blame them. Even to this day, if there’s a big fight on Sphinn (which has become controversy HQ for SEO) or the forums, I can’t help but look - maybe that’s just human nature.

Paul: You have a reputation of being an approachable and likeable guy, Rand, so how much does it hurt when you see some of the Mozbashing going on?

Rand: The first few times it happened, particularly over this summer, I was pretty torn up. I couldn’t understand the perspective or motivation of the person behind the attacks and I was shocked to see so many people I considered friends voting up the posts, leaving negative comments and appearing to support it. However, I’ve talked to a lot of people since then who’ve told me that it really is to be expected when you go from an underdog to a visible player in any community. Since then, we’ve had a few more negative posts bubble to the surface, but I’ve done much better with shaking them off, and understanding that it comes with the territory. I guess I still think of SEOmoz as really small - there’s still only 9 of us in the office, but I can empathize with the position of looking for chinks in the armor. Certainly, it’s an activity we all do with the search engines, the major social sites, industry notables like Calcanis or Scoble or Arrington, so really, it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

I am certainly NOT suggesting I’m nearly as well-known or influential as any of the aforementioned companies or individuals - SEOmoz is still just a tiny blip on the radar.

Paul: What’s your take on Google’s relationship with the majority of webmasters and SEO’s. Do you feel as though their could be more room for communication between the groups?

Rand: Undeniably. However, I have to give Google immense credit for the strides they’ve taken over the last 4 years. When I first got into the industry, other than the occasional conversation at an SES conference between Matt Cutts and some SEOs, Google was an invisible player. No phone number, no emails, no blogs, forum participation only every 3-6 months by a mysterious, pseudonymed figure. We’ve come an incredibly long way since then, with Matt Cutts‘ blog, Webmaster Central, interviews online and more. Today, before Danny or Barry make a post on SELand, they can actually email Googlers and get responses before posting to help give the information some added authenticity.

The big problem with Google’s communication is that it doesn’t scale. They’d either have to offer a paid service for dispute resolution / troubleshooting (which would be viewed as corrupt by many folks) or provide the service pro bono, which would require tens of thousands of hours of manpower each day (maybe more).

Paul: Can we talk about the relevancy of the results getting pulled back from Google. What are your thoughts since universal kicked in? Do you feel that positioning for videos and books deserve the prominent positions they are given just because they come from an authoritative site?

Rand: In my opinion, Google still has the very best relevancy among the major engines for long and mid-tail queries. As far as universal search goes, I think that it’s something they’re continuing to test and tweak, but if we’re still seeing it in the results, that means only one thing - it’s improved the metrics Google cares about - return visits and searcher satisfaction. Just because I may not like it for certain results, or for results on my clients’ targeted phrases doesn’t mean that it isn’t working great for the majority of users.

The one word I’d shy away from using in your question is “deserve.” I think that question could be asked equally of virtually any site or page listed for a non-navigational query. “Deserve” is fundamentally subjective, and it implies that a human being’s judgment went into the process. While humans may be creating the algorithms behind the results, it’s pretty tough to say something like “Google must think they deserve to be here,” when in fact, if you actually surveyed every engineer at Google, they might say they think the result stinks and they’d like to find ways to get something better in its place. Yes - you can hold them responsible for creating Universal and putting certain types of results above others, but only at a macro level. Once you get down to a particular set of SERPs, you’ve got to remove the personal input from the query.

Paul: I think it was Jim Hedger who termed the phrase “webamorphosis”, not sure, but its where I read it first. You mentioned earlier that your only 4 years in with SEOmoz do you feel that everything is going as planned or has the goalposts moved so many times that the business is undergoing constant “webamorphosis” to deal with all the marketing potentials?

Rand: I’d certainly say the goalposts have been in perpetual motion. However, with this latest round of changes, we’re finally on a steady track with premium content as the driver of 95% of our future efforts. All of our marketing and promotion and content work from here on is centered around making premium content better and making it more visible to the web audience.

Paul: Out of all the SEO tools you have on offer over at SEOmoz (I don’t have Premium Membership but I’m working on that post count) which are your favourites and can you tell me more about SEOmoz developing a full scale SEO certification program?

Rand: My personal favorites… Hmm… I really love the new Marketplace (which is totally free), but that’s not really a tool. The tools I’ve been using most often lately are the Term Target (which Mel & Jeff recently revamped) and the Crawl Test. Both are fantastic for finding weak spots in on-page optimization. The juicy link finder tool is also an amazing resource - it’s amazingly efficient at making the link identification process clean and easy.

Paul: Finally, Rand, we have a fledgling but friendly community (Shaun, Mike, Colin, James etc…) here in Scotland. Andrew Girdwood from Big Mouth, is probably our most established export in the search world. What words of advice can you give to young SEO/SEM businessness that are in the process of earning those areas of trust and reliability?

Rand: Find something in the SEO world that you can do better than anyone else, even if it’s very niche, then write about it, present about it, make videos and podcasts about it, maybe even write a book about it. If you can show the SEO community that your work in a particular field is superior, they will welcome you with open arms (and thousands of links). Better yet, this community is so generous, you’ll find that folks will consistently refer projects your way.

Cheers, Rand!

I put forward the question to Rand that if he would do a Q & A in the comments (as is the norm via our interview sessions). Rand may reply – but remember he’s a busy man after all.