Interview with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz

There’s a nice interview with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz about SEO and more over at E-consultancy - riding on the coattails of Rand’s excellent search engine ranking factors doc.

On links:

2. The study still values links very highly, yet I have created pages that rank highly on content alone (on new websites). What are your thoughts on links vs content?

Link popularity is absolutely critical in competitive fields. When attempting to rank for keywords that have 20+ companies all competing for the first page of results, the links you build are going to be more important than the “on-page” factors like keyword use in the title tag and repetition in the body content – anyone can do that.

However, in non-competitive markets or with sites that are primarily focused on getting the “long tail” (those searches that are only performed 1-2X per month, but make up the bulk of all searches), you can do exceptionally well if you simply keep the site clean, usable and valuable. Anyone can rank a page for “blue pigeon artichokes”, but if only two or three users find your site via that search, it’s not a very valuable #1 ranking. Of course, with 5,000 pages of content, each getting only 1-2X search referrals per month, you can still do remarkably well.

3. Is link quality more important than link quantity?

Absolutely. You can find sites in competitive spaces with 50-100,000 backlinks (as reported by Yahoo!, currently the most authoritative source) ranking 5-10 positions behind sites with only 500-1000 links.

The difference is not only page quality (in terms of the actual value of content of the linking pages) but also the quality, reputation and trust that the search engines place in the sites that host the linking pages. 50,000 scraper sites or blog comment spam links aren’t equivalent to 10 or 20 high level links from government, educational or news sites.

You also should consider the value of traffic that’s inherent in links. SEOmoz gets less than 10% of its traffic through search engines, yet receives 500-1000 visitors every day just from referring links. If a link’s sending you traffic, it’s a quality link in my book.

On SEO reading:

11. Who are your favourite thought leaders / bloggers / SEO experts?

I really like the intelligence and careful thought of Bill Slawski (who goes by bragadocchio), Ian McAnerin and Dan Thies. I’m also a fan of some folks who are trying to cross over from IR (Information Retrieval – the academic side of search) into SEO like Dr. Edel Garcia and Xan Porter, who runs the (http://spaces.msn.com/members/search-science/PersonalSpace.aspx) Search Science blog.

As far as bloggers go, I read the usual SEO sites every day – (http://www.threadwatch.org) Threadwatch, (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/) SearchEngineWatch, (http://www.seobook.com) SEO Book and (http://www.seroundtable.com/) Search Engine Roundtable. But, I really enjoy some of the niche bloggers like (http://www.insearchofstuff.com) In Search Of Stuff (humour), Patrick Gavin’s (http://www.linkbuildingblog.com) Link Building Blog and Todd Malicoat’s (http://www.stuntdubl.com/) Stuntdubl.

There’s a ton more in the interview, so be sure to read it if you’re interested.