Last week while in Seattle for the Moz conference, Rand Fishkin – who is keynoting at our SMX East event, invited me to his home/office to interview him. In part one of the interview, we spoke about the early days of the SEO industry, the wild parties Yahoo and Google held, how we both got into the SEO community, how he learned SEO and started his own community. We also discussed why he started Moz, the challenges he had over the years, why he ultimately left the company he co-founded and started his new start up named SparkToro.

Rand and I have known each other pretty much our whole entire adult lives. We essentially grew up with the SEO industry – so this was a special interview for me. Here is part one of the interview and part two will come later this week and cover more trending topics on Google and SEO.

I started this vlog series recently, and if you want to sign up to be interviewed, you can fill out this form on Search Engine Roundtable. You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel by clicking here.