10/07/08 by seobrien | Conferences / Events, Fun, Search | 1 Comment »
Vintage Bath & Tub’s Allan Dick hosted a fantastic dinner last night; bringing together the cream of the crop of search for a few hours of fun and food.
I had no idea the fun would serve to validate my assertion that SEOmoz is on to something big. The annual dinner always features an innovative Search twist on a well known game… That statement really demands explanation: This year, the game was Hungry Hungry Hippos with each of the 4 hippos serving as search engines. The object of the game? To determine which engine indexes the most content (in this case, the little white balls). At each table, a game was set up allowing everyone to join in the fun. At the end of the dinner, a deathmatch was held with 4 champions: Yahoo, Google, MSN, and a unique outlier – Rand Fishkin and SEOmoz.
10/06/08 by seobrien | Analytics, Insights / Research, Natural Search / SEO, Search, Vendors / Agencies | 1 Comment »
I’ve just seen the future of link analytics and it is SEOmoz. Perhaps the most engrossing and entertaining presentation at SMX East was Rand Fishkin’s introduction of Linkscape, an advanced link intelligence engine delivering rich data to website owners and SEOs regarding inlinks, related anchor text, trust, and rank.
SEOmoz has indexed over 200M domains to deliver extensive insight on who is linking to you and how. Can’t figure out how your competitors are ranking so well? 
Linkscape will report for you who is linking to THEM and the value each link provides to your competitors through innovative scores reporting, among other things, page rank (mozRank), trust (mozTrust), and aggregate domain strength (Domain Juice). More, they identify links that are nofollowed, embedded in images, or 301d.
Watching the presentation, I stood in awe of the work they’d done. Believe it or not though, I was even more overwhelmed when dawned on me, while watching Rand introduce Linkscape, that Zvents’ founder Tyler Kovaks must be an unknown Rand Fishkin relative.
*screeeeeech* What!?? What does that possibly have to do with such exciting news?
It is too hard to ignore!
Consider the most significant coincidences: Both are search entrepreneurs and leaders in their respective fields – One, local search, and the other, SEO. How could two guys so successfully involved with search and so follicly gifted not be related?!? I just can’t wrap my head around the possibility of anything but their being long lost brothers.
The resemblance is uncanny and certainly, 
a far less disturbing revelation than the SponsoredReviews.com, clearly failed, attempt to mate Rand with Todd Malicoat.
I have to ponder though (and we’re back to SEOmoz), indexing the web is a monumental task requiring countless servers and a high-end, scalable database to manage the ever changing index of results; let alone the complex, dynamic, meta data affecting the result set. Are they really investing so heavily in advanced search technology just to usher in a new era of SEO transparency? Sure, Linkscape users have to pay for the premium features but I’m not sure the revenue stream from a few SEOs will cover the investment. With such a comprehensive index, and with the brilliant minds behind SEOmoz developing complex algorithms to report things like mozTrust, could there not be a new search engine in our future? I for one say, ‘hmmmm.’
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