Welcome to the third edition of the Bloggers Face-Off. After featuring Problogger against Shoemoney and John Chow against Matt Coddington I am happy to announce that on this round we will have two famous SEO bloggers.
Rand Fishkin runs one of the most authoritative SEO blogs across the Internet, SEOMoz. Lee Odden is the man behind the Online Marketing Blog, and the CEO of a search marketing agency called TopRank Online Marketing. Lee and Rand were very nice and available when I contacted them. I was fearing that Rand would not even reply my email, let alone answer the questions twice because the first time they were not completely clear :). Anyway I tried to include some SEO related questions this time so it should be a interesting and useful reading for everyone, check it out:
| Rand Fishkin |  Lee Odden |
|
|---|---|---|
| 1. How long have you been blogging? | 2.5 years | 3.5 years |
| 2. How many hours do you dedicate to your blog daily? | 2-3 (Sunday – Thursday) | 0-2 hours |
| 3. What is your favorite social bookmarking site? | I’m a huge fan of Reddit | From a user perspective del.icio.us |
| 4. How many page views the blog generates daily? | ~26,000, but pg views is an awful metric. We get ~10K daily visits | Not much compared to the big guns. A modest 2500-3000 |
| 5. What is the optimal URL structure for a blog? | Read here for URL best practices | http://www.domainname .com/123/post-title/ |
| 6. Do you make money directly from your blog? | In a way – SEOmoz offers premium membership which provides access to some cool tools and we sell articles/ebooks on the site | We do not accept advertising on the blog, but ads in the RSS feed generate a few thousand per month |
| 7. Is Alexa a reliable measure of traffic? | No. It’s often worse than a complete guess | No and Google’s Peter Norvig makes a good case as to why. It’s significantly slanted towards techie types |
| 8. Do .edu and .gov backlinks carry a higher weight? | They do, mostly because those sites earn a lot of trusted links themselves and typically have very trustworthy content | Yes, but not because of the top level dominan, but because those sites tend to be heavy on authoritative site characteristics |
| 9. How many RSS feeds do you read daily? | None. I read about 20 blogs daily and another 80 each week | 15-20 |
| 10. Should the average blogger use sitemaps? | No, but they should use webmaster central | No unless they are having indexing issues |
| 11. If you could read only one blog, which one would you pick? | For search stuff, SearchEngineland.com | That is an evil question 🙂 I’ll pick something light like gapingvoid.com |
| 12. What is the secret of your success, expressed in one word? | Openness | Capitalism |
