How Rand Fishkin Created An SEO Empire: The Story Of Moz.com

How Rand Fishkin Created An SEO Empire: The Story Of Moz.com

Our obsession with search dates back to the very early days of the web. Before smartphones and social media transformed our lives, allowing us to communicate and discover information in real-time from anywhere in the world through blazing-fast pocket computers, companies realized that the organization and dissemination of information in the digital sphere would become big business.

However, the early-comers to the so-called search-game have all-but vanished from the marketplace. The meteoric rise of search engines such as Alta Vista, and later on, Yahoo, were staggering, to say the least. But they were unable to keep up the momentum or retain that marketshare. In fact, ever since the release of a then-little-known search engine called Google, things have drastically changed in this virtual playing field.

When Google first opened its virtual doors in 1997, people flocked to it. At a time when many of the then-prominent search engines were relying primarily on hand-indexing data, Google instead leveraged powerful algorithms to categorize and catalog the world's digital information based on a potent little formula called PageRank. Since then, much of the online-search marketshare has been skewed.

Today, most of the world's search is undoubtedly conducted through Google's search engine, accounting for roughly 89.44 percent of desktop searches as of the first quarter of 2016, a stranglehold that they've roughly maintained throughout the company's existence. However, while many appreciate the prominence of Google, few understand the search engine's intricacies. 

While other organic search engines came before it, during it, and surely after it, Google's highly-relevant searches gave quick and accurate results without all the muss and fuss of extraneous clutter. When searching on Google, it became known that results found on the first page of its search engine results pages (SERPs) were going to be the most relevant and useful in our quest for information. In fact, the search giant has built a colossal business on this very fundamental tenet.

Still, with the rise of Google, has also come the rise of confusion. Through obscurity in some of its practices, it's had to shield many of the factors involved with ranking at the top of SERPs today. Not only due to the fact that the underlying foundation for an impartial organic-search system demands some obscurity to avoid gaming of the system, but also because of its desire to shield many of its inner-workings from potential competitors and rule-abusers.

But don't blame Google entirely for that obscurity. It's largely had no choice, especially recently. Its hands were tied due to the rise of unscrupulous individuals that learned how to bend and break Google's many rules that helped to guarantee the most relevant search results, quickly jettisoning to the top of SERPs and reaping all the economic benefits that come with near-limitless free organic search traffic.

What started out as small groups wielding invaluable information, spawned into an illicit 'Black Hat' industry filled with sly and underhanded tactics meant to advance their own agendas. But Google didn't lay down and play dead. It evolved and took action, instituting a slew of earth-shattering  Algorithm Adjustment that went by names like Panda, Penguin, and subsequently, Hummingbird. All of this was meant to weed out the so-called spammers while increasing the overall quality and value proposition of the web.

And Google accomplished just that. Still, in its wake, it's left an industry filled with misinformation and disinformation, with a number of so-called experts that spoon and dish out advice across an entire spectrum of mediums that stretches from blogs to social media, books, audiobooks and beyond.

Today, everyone knows the importance of organic search. They know the importance of being found organically in the top position of whatever search might be conducted. Its value is beyond measure. And, with so much competition vying for eyes amidst the same search traffic, an entire industry has been built atop this highly-lucrative field called search engine optimization (SEO).

The Rise of Moz.com