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Posts by Rand Fishkin:

Startups

Why I Never Want to Have a “For-Profit” Business

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Making money is an excellent side-effect of successful businesses. But, it’s a terrible core purpose. Last week, Fred Wilson wrote one of my favorite posts in a while on Short-Term Thinking vs. Long-Term Thinking. Here’s an excerpt: …Sure Samsung is making a killing on handset sales right now. So is Apple. That goes to their bottom line and then onto…
Moz Personal Team

The Expectation of 100%

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s 4:36am. I’ve been awake for an hour, stumbling through email and catching up on reading. G and I flew back from London two nights ago, and although I slept great last night, I crashed at 10pm tonight and only managed 6 hours before the jetlag kicked in. Casey, who runs the inbound engineering team at Moz, and I had…
Data Marketing

What Do Correlation Metrics Really Tell Us About Search Rankings?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I’m excited to see the marketing field getting more interested in correlation data and metrics around SEO. There’s a lot of folks citing data from SearchMetrics’ UK Study, from Mark Collier’s Open Algorithm project, and from Moz’s own ranking factors and follow-up reports. (Searchmetrics’ study at left, OpenAlgorithm at right) The trouble is how this data gets perceived and interpreted…
Hiring Startups Team

What Company Culture IS and IS NOT

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Frustrated. Disturbed. Disappointed. That’s how I feel after reading a recent article that appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek called “Job Applicants’ Cultural Fit Can Trump Qualifications.” I don’t typically like to rant against stuff on the web, but I’m worried this is a case where the popularity of the piece (note the thousand upvotes, 600+ comments, and hyper-negativity in the Reddit…
Marketing Psychology

Why “Optimization” is a Terrible Way to Think About SEO

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Sometimes we make assumptions that lead us in the wrong direction. I’ve made plenty, and I’ll continue to make them for as long as I’m alive. And sometimes, we’re inadvertently responsible for wrong assumptions made by others. When that’s the case (and we notice it), there’s an obligation to correct the misunderstanding. I recently encountered an example of this in…
Hiring Startups Team

Startups Cannot Afford to Have Indispensable Employees (and not for the reason you think)

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
“Become indispenable to your employer.” That’s the advice I see from job training and professional coaches all the time. And I can empathize with why it exists. Many employers are not supporters of their teams, and treat human resources as, well, resources that just happen to be human. That fleshy cognition thus imbues them with all sorts of problematic and…
Data

The Most Followed Twitter Users with “SEO” in Their Bio

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I was playing around on Followerwonk tonight (man that tool is awesome) and was puzzled by the bio search results for “SEO.” Have a look:  Danny Sullivan’s Twitter profile certainly makes sense, but the ones above him are curious. I’ve never heard of any of these folks (which certainly could be my fault for being more heads-down lately), nor are…
Psychology Team

The Uncomfortable Balance

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Every CEO, founder, manager, and probably most all of us at some point in our professional lives have asked these two questions: Am I pushing the people on my team too hard? Am I not pushing the people on my team hard enough? These two nag at me all the time. There are days when I marvel at what Mozzers…
Personal Psychology

The Mathematics of Core Values

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Over the holiday weekend, Geraldine took me to see Lincoln. I’d watched a clip aired during the Daily Show last week that had me excited to see the film, and Fred Wilson’s post sealed the deal. That clip contained the following quote: Euclid’s first common notion is this:  ‘Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each…

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