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Posts by Rand Fishkin:

Personal

Cynical Optimism

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Geraldine sometimes tries to describe my outlook on life as cynical optimism. I think that’s a fair assessment. I generally believe that humans will do a lot of stupid, selfish, hurtful, tragic things to each other and themselves. I see this as exacerbated by behavioral and evolutionary psychology, which is poorly understood and even more poorly compensated for on an…
Marketing Moz

Mozcon Feedback & Erica’s Letter to Speakers

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I’ve written before on this blog about how we’ve been working to make Mozcon a remarkable outlier in the field of marketing conferences. Today, I received my feedback scores from Erica McGillivray, who (along with Charlene & Jen) did most of the organization and speaker wrangling for the event. I wanted so share that letter here on the blog, as…
Marketing

The First 500 Links

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Most of the time, when I write about SEO, I like to present facts, data, or lessons learned from numerous experiences. This post doesn’t have those (well, maybe a little on the experential side, but not nearly enough to make it a rock solid assumption). Instead, I’m going out on a limb with a suspicion about how Google’s evaluating and…
Team

Making Performance Reviews Better

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
We’re doing performance reviews at SEOmoz right now. It’s tough, because on the one hand, I agree with a lot of the general criticism of traditional reviews and I’ve seen plenty of data to suggest that classic reviews can have negatives that outweigh their value. Some good reading on that here: 1, 2, 3, and 4. On the other side,…
Marketing

Mobile Won’t Change Everything

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I constantly hear the refrain that “mobile’s going to change everything.” Everything in this context is typically presumed to mean search, social media, advertising, marketing, and the Internet broadly. Since I’m a marketing professional and a marketing-focused entrepreneur, I’ll ignore the other items and focus on the marketing part of that equation. And, perhaps weirdly, I disagree with the statement…
Personal

Harnessing Beautiful Writing

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In the past few weeks, I’ve noticed myself drawn to some exceptional examples of the written word. I’m not sure why. I don’t normally seek out poetic writers or articles that focus on the flourish and elegance of the words rather than the content, but when it’s caught my eye recently, it’s made me want to remember how it was…
Moz Startups

Our First Acquisition

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
You’ve likely seen the news today that Moz made its first major acquisition. It was an exciting, rewarding day at the office and an invigorating one for our team, particularly the Followerwonk folks. We’re still a very young company and so this is a bit of a test for us across the board. Acquisitions are notorious for having challenges around…
Moz Team

Diving Deep on TAGFEE

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
For the last 5 years, SEOmoz has lived by a set of core values collectively referred to as TAGFEE. The acronym represents the values we hold to be more important than any particular business goal (such as revenue, growth, margins, etc). And, though we believe that these values will help us be more successful in achieving those business-minded goals, we…

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