Interview: Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz
I have to tell you. This was an interview that I was thrilled to do. We here at Curious Office are investors in SEOmoz along with Ignition Partners but that isn’t why I was excited about this post. First off, I REALLY love the SEOmoz products. I have so many other things to worry about besides SEO but the truth is that I always WANT to spend more time playing with these tools and learning about how search engines work. More importantly, Rand is just an incredibly bright guy. He is articulate and probably one of the most knowledgeable folks in the SEO game. He’s certainly one of the most visible. Because of his knowledge and the hard work of everyone at SEOmoz, you have here an interview from the founder of one of the top search optimization resources sites on the whole webernet. Enjoy folks.
Outside SEO circles you might be lesser known. Tell us about Rand Fishkin. Where are you from and how did you become an SEO super star?
Well, Rand Fishkin is a total asshole. I hear that guy barely has time to make his wife dinner anymore or take out the trash 
Seriously, though, I’m New Jersey born, Seattle raised, and come from a pretty normal family. My Dad was recruited by Boeing to be an engineer out of college in ‘79. My Mom worked at an ad agency in Manhattan and when they moved out, she started her own marketing & print design business. When I was in college, her clients started needing websites and I was convenient and cheap.
In 2002, we’d been working together a few years and SEO became a huge subject. It was hard to find good contractors, so I learned it myself and actually struggled quite a bit. SEOmoz is the result of those struggles – the harder I tried, the more I’d write about successes, failures, frustrations and experiments. As the blog & tools became popular, I was invited to speak at more and more events, and eventually reached the niche popularity we’ve achieved today.
Honestly, it still amazes me how influential and well-known the brand is inside SEO, particularly compared to the relative obscurity of the company (and even the practice of SEO in general) in the wider business and technology world. Sadly, I think that the early dominance of the SEO field by spammers, snake-oil salesmen and swindlers has poisoned many smart businesspeople & developers against a very legitimate and effective form of marketing.
How would you describe what SEOmoz is all about if you just had a few moments to talk with someone who didnt know about your firm?
First off, I usually have to explain SEO. Here’s how that goes:
When you search on Google, there are two kinds of results that come up – ads (that Google charges money to list) and organic results that appear based on their ranking algorithms. SEO is the practice of improving the accessibility, targeting & marketing of websites and their content in order to achieve greater visibility in the organic listings.
Then I can get to SEOmoz:
SEOmoz is a community hub for SEO topics of all varieties. Our primary business is the “PRO membership,” a subscription model that gives access to our advanced tools & SEO resources. We also serve tens of thousands of daily readers via our blog, free tools and free SEO services marketplace.
You thought hard about financing this company. Why did you finally decide to do it the way you did?
I wrote about that decision extensively in a few blog posts – If You Were SEOmoz, Would You Take Outside Investment? – and – SEOmoz’s Venture Capital Deal Closes. Essentially, as a first-time entrepreneur with a profit-generating company, it was hard to justify the value of giving up equity for cash. However, a few things made that decision easier:
Institutional investment made us a much more serious company – from metrics to processes to accountability, it turned us from a “project” into a “Business” (capital “B”). Investment gave us a much quicker growth path, one we couldn’t have achieved alone
Venture capital enhances the “sale-ability” of a company tremendously. We gave up equity, but we’re far more likely to have a large exit than we would have been operating on our own (for a myriad of reasons).
We couldn’t have built Linkscape (a web index that attempts to replicate many of the metrics search engines use to evaluate websites and pages – and a longtime dream of mine)
I think that overall, the investment has been incredibly positive for us. That said, it’s not the case for every business or every entrepreneur. I’d urge everyone to be extremely cautious in making decisions like this.
What is a common SEO practice that is largely misunderstood by people?
I get more tough questions about canonicalization than anything else. It’s a very hard subject to understand, but it’s getting increasingly simple to properly address and correct. Here’s how it works:
You have multiple URLs on which the same content is accessible. Examples could include:
http://www.curiousoffice.com vs. http://curiousoffice.com vs. http://www.curiousoffice.com/index.php
http://www.curiousoffice.com/blogpost?id=123 vs. http://www.curiousoffice.com/blogpost?id=123&display=print
http://www.curiousoffice.com/store/item2 vs. http://www.curiousoffice.com/store/item2?refid=6a43j
The search engines come, crawl all those different versions of the same material and see some overlap/duplication, but don’t necessarily know which ones they should filter out.
Links come in from across the web to the different versions – some earn more links than others, but all are getting referenced somehow, somewhere
The engines see the different links and only count some of them (to the version they kept included in their index)
You lose out on two fronts – link love and popularity metrics don’t properly flow AND engines may filter out pages that you intended to be separate or not filter those that are duplicate.
This is a really hard problem, but the engines have two tools that make it easier. The first is the 301 re-direct (good article on that topic here), which instructs the engines to pass link metrics from one version to another (unfortunately, they also direct visitors from one version to another, but this can be practical sometimes). The second, new initiative is the Canonical URL Tag, which allows a site to tell the engines to “canonicalize” all the versions of a page to one URL via an HTML tag in the header of the document.
Linkscape blows me away. Why should others care about it?
I’m thrilled that you like it so much; we’re certainly really excited about it, too. Essentially, Linkscape is a method to see the web the ways the engines do and to have metrics and data points that are common to folks like Google, Yahoo! & MSN/Live. My favorite feedback so far was from an engineer with one of the engines who commented that “this looks just like our internal tool for diagnosing links.”
Linkscape is two things, really – it’s a data source powered by a search-engine sized crawl of the web (~30 billion pages, updated every 3-4 weeks) – and it’s also a tool that lets you dig into the links that point to a site or page. From that data, you can extrapolate answers to a lot of critical SEO related questions – everything from “How can I find the links that are helping my competition rank well?” and “Who’s linking to me and what are they saying?” to “Which of these partnerships I’m thinking about are going to get me more link value for SEO?” and “Which sites have earned high quality/trustworthy links?”
We always felt that an accessible, SEO-built link graph was one of the biggest missing pieces to solving SEO issues and answering critical questions. Linkscape, particularly as it improves, is making that a reality.
If you weren’t an SEO guru what might your other career be?
I love writing and I like to travel. I’m also a big kitchen guy – love to cook. Maybe a travel/cooking author? Perhaps a chef (although I’d really have to work on my knife skills)?
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Keep up the good work Rand!