SEOSiren is excited to Interview the most famous SEO consultant, Mr. Rand Fishkin. Rand Fishkin is the CEO and Co-founder of SEOmoz, Inc, which is an American software development company based in Seattle, WA. The company was set up by Rand Fishkin in 2004 as an SEO firm, which later shifted to software development by 2010. Rand Fishkin specializes in search engine optimization and Internet Marketing. He likes to guide his loyal subscribers by providing valuable information in SEOmoz official blog via White Board Friday. Before getting into the interview, I would like to add some information about SEOmoz and their current services.

What does SEOmoz do?

SEOmoz develops SEO softwares to provide great value to people online. They develop SEO applications, which provides a robust link intelligence API. SEOmoz has built an incredible community to keep people updated with current SEO trends. They participate in all kinds of marketing events, meetups to keep their team updated with latest information. SEOmoz has the most powerful in house SEO team on the planet, and they hire only good people to work in their team.

 

What does SEOmoz Pro do?

SEOmoz Pro is the most popular SEO software in the world. They provide a complete set of software, tools, and resources to maximize our SEO efforts. Members of SEOmoz Pro will get the moz campaign based applications, SEO tools, free webinars, SEO guides and full access to Open Site Explorer.

Interview with Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz: 

1) Hi Rand, Most of us know you as an SEO god, but we still want your introduction for our new SEO friends who just entered the industry.  Also please tell us about SEOmoz in few words.

I think I object to the classification of a deity, but I’m flattered nonetheless 🙂 I’m actually just a terrible web designer, who became a decent SEO, and then was lucky enough to be surrounded by excellent people and good fortune at the right time. As an SEO consultant, I’d always been frustrated by the lack of great tools to get more insight into how search algorithms work, and the Moz toolset was born from that frustration.

Today, the company has ~130 people working hard to make great software for marketers to track and improve their inbound efforts (SEO, social, content, etc).

2) What is the easiest way of up ranking an authority website?

If you’re a true authority, often it’s as easy as choosing the right keywords, publishing, and promoting to your community/followers. That’s the beauty of having a powerful domain.

3) What do you think about Black Hat SEO tools which rank up a website instantly? Should they be used to gain authority?

They’re dangerous. The ones you’ll stumble across on the web are probably not going to work, except to get you penalized/banned. Even the “good” ones that might work temporarily have a short life, and a ton of risk. For any brand trying to build a long-term web presence, I’d stay away.

4) Google penalizes a website which doesn’t use a proper website layout or theme! How far is this true? 

I’ve never heard that before, nor observed any evidence that hand-built sites far worse than professional layouts or themes. I’d say that’s entirely a myth.

5) What changes are you expecting from Google in Penguin 2.0?

More aggressive action against manipulative links, including probably several kinds that a lot of SEOs today believe to be safe, is almost certainly coming. I’d also anticipate that some of the scalable tactics less-high-quality websites are using to outrank their higher-quality competitors will fall by the wayside. Google doesn’t actually want to rank the sites and pages with the most/best links. They want to rank the sites/pages that best serve searchers. Links just happen to be historically correlated with good sites. It’s hard to say how long that will remain true.

6) Writing short content in your website leads to Google penalties! Is this true? 

Absolutely not! Twitter, Tumblr, many Dictionary.com entries, and plenty of image searches lead to very small amounts of content on the page. Google doesn’t penalize for short content; they penalize for not satisfying the searcher’s query (and sometimes that means a lot of content, sometimes it means just a little).

7) Is getting Links from article directories a good idea?

Almost definitely not. I did a Whiteboard Friday on this topic in 2011: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/article-marketing-mostly-a-scam-whiteboard-friday – that’s still true today.

8) There are many SEO companies in the industry now, but how has SEOmoz evolved to become so big?

We were one of the first SEO blogs to reach scale and attract a community. Today, many of those community members help make the blog even better than just the contributions our team can make. We also scaled our tools/software quickly, and today serve more than 21,000 subscribers, many of whom refer our next generation of customers (thanks to all of you!).

9) What is the future of SEO?

SEO is becoming a tactic in the suite of a modern, digital marketer, rather than a separate practice/profession. That means lots of good things for the adoption of our expertise and practices as an industry, but it also means fragmentation and frustration. Such is the way of all industries – they mature.

10) Will Google switch to a purely social ranking algorithm in future?

No, probably not. I think Google’s going to work hard to keep their algorithms very disparate and never rely on a single factor. They likely wish they could have diversified away from links earlier, but they’re certainly keeping links as they add other signals.

I hope this interview helped you in understand the future of SEO in coming days. I personally thank Mr. Rand Fishkin for spending his valuable time with our readers. You can like Rand Fishkin by clicking the below Like button. Also take a look at the SEOmoz Pro software to increase the SEO leads in your business. Please leave your valuable comments in the below section.