Published: June 9, 2010
Rand Fishkin is the CEO & Co-Founder of SEOmoz , a leader in the field of search engine optimization tools, resources & community. In 2009, he co-authored the Art of SEO from O'Reilly Media and was named among the 30 Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30 by BusinessWeek. Rand has been written about it in The Seattle Times , Newsweek and the NY Times among others and keynoted conferences on search around the world. He's particularly passionate about the SEOmoz blog, read by tens of thousands of search professionals each day. In his miniscule spare time, Rand enjoys the company of his amazing wife, Geraldine .
Ben Hendrickson graduated from the Computer Science Department at the University of Washington, he then rather enjoyed being a developer at Microsoft, although not quite as much as his current position serving the SEOmoz corporation. Nick Gerner leads SEOmoz API development and worked on solutions for historical Linkscape data tracking prior to leaving SEOmoz about 1 month ago.
Interview Transcript
Eric Enge: Can you provide an overview of what Linkscape is, for the readers who aren't familiar with you all and what you have been developing?
Rand Fishkin: Linkscape is an index of the World Wide Web, built by crawling tens of billions of pages and building metrics from that data. The information Linkscape provides is something webmasters have cared about and wanted to see but search engines have been reluctant to expose.
Linkscape is a way to understand how links impact a website and how they impact the rankings given by search engines. Our aim is to expose the data in two formats. One for advanced users to perform some of the complicated analyses they have longed to do but couldn't, and a second to provide simple recommendations and advice to webmasters who don't necessarily need to learn the ins and outs of how metrics are calculated.
Ultimately Linkscape will provide actionable recommendations that go beyond raw data to explain a site's ranking and the rankings of competitors. It routes the source of the links and shows a user who is linking to a competitor, but could link to them. Our tools also expose which links are more useful and which ones are less so.
Eric Enge: One interesting aspect of your tools is that in addition to collecting a large dataset of pages and links across the web, you do your own calculations to approximate trust value and rank value as in mozRank or mozTrust. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Rand Fishkin: For those who are interested in the technical details and methodologies, the patent applications are now available . For the less technical webmaster, mozRank is a way to think about raw popularity in terms of how many links point to a page and how important those links are and consequently how important that page is. It leverages the classic PageRank concept.
MozTrust similarly asks the same question, but with a trust base bias. Inst ...