Sugarrae - Never Mess With a Woman Who Can Pull Rank

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I started this blog less than a year ago and one of the things I’ve been doing almost since launch is interviewing people in the search engine marketing world on topics or services that I find interesting.

Listed below are the interviews I’ve done, from newest to oldest. If you have a person or company you’d like to see interviewed, let me know.

Interviews:

Link Dev Interview with Eric Ward, Rae Hoffman, Rand Fishkin, Roger Montti and Todd Malicoat
I went to five people I respect when it comes to link development and suggested we could do one mass group interview on link development techniques and theories. Each person contributed two questions they thought would be interesting to hear the answers from and all five interviewees answered each question. What you’ll find is that concurring opinions, differing opinions and a lot of link solid development advice was the end result of the time donated to this piece.

Interview with Tim Converse, Websearch Engineer
I’ve had several conversations with Tim Converse and he’s a good guy with a quirky sense of humor. When he agreed to an interview with me, I wasn’t expecting that he’d be leaving Yahoo and I’d be publishing an exit interview with him mere days after his announcement. Tim was nice enough to give me some of his background, his feelings on Yahoo! Search and about the hype of senior management leaving, as well as unveils the company he’s moving on to.

Interview with Best of the Web’s Brian Prince
Brian sat down and gave me one of the funniest and interesting interviews I’ve ever had the pleasure of doing. The BOTW guys are known for their excellence in the guerilla marketing arena and I was excited to be able to pick his brain about how they’ve achieved such great success using that avenue. This is the first interview I’ve ever done where I had to refrain from laughing or making a follow up to every single great answer I was given.

Interview with Michael Ferguson from Ask.com on Rebranding Ask
I saw Michael speak at SES Toronto while I was speaking there as well and his presentation was fantastic. I knew I had to sit down with him and talk about usability and the effects they saw during their rebranding process. The interview turned out great, covered not only Ask’s rebranding efforts, but also gave a lot of tips the average webmaster can use as well. The interview was published in two parts over at Search Engine Watch.

Interview with Joel Lesser of LinksManager
LinksManager was granted a patent earlier this year on the reciprocal linking software, but several parts of the patent left me questioning it, such as their press release stating that they were granted a patent for “ethical” link exchaning, as well as the inference that the patent also covered auto-rotation of links, something many webmasters have been doing on their own for a very long time. Joel was nice enough to sit in the hotseat and let me grill him about the patent.

Interview with Vanessa Fox of Google Webmaster Central
I’ve met Vanessa several times now and we share being huge fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I asked her if she’d be willing to do an interview on how bloggers specifically could get the most out of Sitemaps, which was the name being used by Google at the time for Webmaster Central. She gave a great interview with a lot of information that avid bloggers shouldn’t miss out on.

Interview with Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo
I love feedburner. By that I mean that I really love it. It’s a fantastic tool and I’m completely addicted to using it and thought an interview with them might clue me in on some ways to get more out of my pro membership and also let me know what would be coming in the future from them. Additionally, Dick was kind enough to be honest about the “spamming incident” that occured in Feedburner’s marketing department a few weeks prior to the interview.

Interview with Yahoo Publisher Network’s Josh Siegel
Right after I launched the blog, I took a chance and emailed someone I knew at Yahoo to see if YPN, which was still less than a year old at the time, might be willing to do an interview. They obliged and answered a lot of questions about their contextual advertising program, including discussing the issues with launching internationally and how publishers could get more out of YPN. I’ve since gotten to know several of the YPN crew and they are a great team and very dedicated to their product.