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Search Engine Pro - Owner of SEOMoz.org - Rand Fishkin Rand Fishkin, owner of SEOmoz.org, is one of the most respected and knowledgable search engine pros in the industry. Fishkin owns SEOmoz.org which know has peaked the 100k member mark in just a few years time. |
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First off, thank you so much Mr. Rand Fishkin for taking time out of your day to help us understand how we can master the search engines and become a successful online guru like yourself.
1. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself. Your name, location, hobbies, etc
I’m Rand Fishkin and I live in Seattle, WA. I just got married and I’m running a tech startup, so my hobbies include working and… ummm… more working. I’m hopeful that I can take a honeymoon sometime next year, and maybe even have enough freetime to watch the NFL playoffs come January.
2. What does an average day look like for you?
I’m not sure if I’ve ever had an average day - one of the nice things about having a crazy schedule. I’m on the road quite a bit - I just got back from New York and have 5 more trips scheduled before the end of the year (and possible more, as they seem to crop up all the time).
When I’m at home, I tend to wake up a bit late (8am or so), do some basic exercises to remind myself I’m no longer sleeping, then work on my computer until around 9:30-10am, answering emails from the previous night. I drive a scooter to my work - about a 15 minute drive - spend the day in meetings, on phone calls, and answering email, then get home, eat dinner, watch the Daily Show & Colbert Report then work until 2-3am, writing blog posts, designing tools, working on consulting projects, etc.
On the weekends, if I’m lucky, I’ll take a few extra hours off and see friends or do something fun with my wife. It’s not a particularly glamorous life, and I actually don’t love the extreme hours, but to make a startup work, it takes a tremendous amount of dedication and energy.
3. SeoMoz.org was created in early 2005. In just 3 years, you have built it up to a member base of 80k. What gave you the edge over everyone else?
I think we’ve got about 103,000 members today, and ~3,000 PRO members. The site started in 2003, actually, in a subfolder on another domain and it was only in 2004 that it got its own web address. I think being something of an early adopter in the SEO blogosphere (there were only a few other big blogs at the time) and having a lot of valuable free tools & content helped us get early traction.
4. In your career, what was the best advice you were ever given?
Be humble. My grandfather told me that years ago and it’s something I’ve been striving for ever since. I think too much hubris inevitably leads to failure. Keeping yourself and your organization from overreaching is extremely important.
5. What do you believe is the most important part in getting your site well ranked? On-Page or Off-Page SEO?
Rather than just give you my opinion, I prefer to point to this document on Google’s Search Engine Ranking Factors - as voted by 37 very smart people (and me). There’s a list of all the important items we think might be in the algorithms, along with scores for how important it was generally considered to be.
For me personally, though, I think that on-page SEO is essential - something you absolutely have to do, and always should do because, comparatively speaking, it’s easy. Link building and link attraction is not.
6. What do you consider makes a quality link?
Three big things matter for link valuation (in a general sense):
- The source of the link - is it a high quality, popular, important web page on an important domain? If so, this adds greatly to the value it provides for search engine rankings.
- What does the link say about you? Does it have valuable, useful anchor text or alt text (if it’s an image)? Is it something that visitors are likely to click on? Is it in a location on a page that suggest editorial integrity and intent, or is it buried in the footer or irrelevant section of the sidebar?
- Why does the link exist? If it’s paid or non-editorial, it might pass less value and if it’s in with other links of low quality or of non-editorial intent, that may reduce the value as well.
7. Do you think quality or quantity gives you a better ranking?
Quality. Quantity of links can be very meaningless. With our new Linkscape tool, we can see sites and pages that have earned hundreds or even thousands of links, but because they come from low-trust, low-quality sources, the value for search engine rankings is minimal.
8. PageRank was obviously developed to give people an accurate idea of how well there page is ranked in Google? When do you think that lost it’s effect and why?
I really don’t think that’s why it was developed. Instead, I believe PageRank was built to be a valuable tool for measuring the query-independent importance of a page based on all the pages that linked to it (and how important they were). Google leveraged this metric, along with hundreds of others, to build the world’s best web search engine and to a certain extent, they still use it today. It’s a great metric for looking at global popularity on a numeric scale, and we’ve actually built our own version of a link popularity score into Linkscape, called mozRank, which operates on similar principles. However, this is not a reliable predictor of ranking and never has been - it does help to predict crawl frequency and indexation, but the best way to predict ranking is to search and see where you rank!
9. Do you have any future plans for Seomoz.org?
So many… We’ve got a million ideas floating around and 3 or 4 big projects in the works. Now that we’ve built an index of the web, there’s a ton of tools and information that we’re excited to be able to offer over the weeks and months to come.
10. Do you have any further tips you could provide us?
It depends on what you’re looking for! I’d certainly suggest checking out the “headsmacking tips” series on SEOmoz, where you’ll find lots of good advice on SEO.
Thank you so much Mr. Rand Fishkin for teaching us about yourself, SEOmoz, and how we can become more successful. Thanks again for your time.
