“AudienceWise marks the culmination of our acquisition spree for this year,” SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin tells WebProNews. “Moving forward in 2013, our focus will be on accelerating our product roadmap and leveraging all the resources we’ve acquired over the last five months. The remainder of 2013 will be dedicated to putting our money where our mouth is: investing in our foundations, and ramping up our product offerings to SEOmoz’s 20,000+ users and our 300,000+ online community members.”

AudienceWise was a company specializing in audience development consulting for publishers and e-commerce sites, but its team will now be integrated into SEOmoz’s as a talent acquisition, though SEOmoz does say it will incorporate some of AudienceWise’s technical processes, strategy and products into the Moz toolkit.

“The main motivators for acquiring AudienceWise are the brains behind the operation, Matthew Brown and Tim Resnik,” says Fishkin. “Matt and Tim are joining Moz to help us scale our in-house marketing and grow our product expertise. Both have built software products in the past (Matt worked with Marshall on SearchCLU, Tim on an online poker subscription service) and have tremendous depth of knowledge in the fields of both inbound and paid marketing.”

“We have a lot of phenomenal talent at SEOmoz, but only a few of us are deep into the fields of SEO, social media, content marketing, email, CRO, etc.,” he adds. “Matt and Tim are here to help serve as mentors and as internal consultant experts to our entire team, a role that I’ve been far too busy to fill effectively over the last 18 months.”

From the sound of it, SEOmoz users have as much to gain from the deal as SEOmoz does.

“We believe that SEOmoz subscribers will benefit immensely from Matt and Tim’s expertise, which will improve how we build our products,” says Fishkin. “Tim is a Big Data junkie. He understands the enormous potential of both structured and unstructured data, as well as the challenges that come with harnessing and leveraging it across all segments of a business.”

“We know that Big Data matters to our users, and Tim’s vision will take us to the next level,” he continues. “Matt has worked in some of the toughest search marketing gigs, including The New York Times and at various Fortune 500 companies. Arguably, there is no tougher search marketing gig than publishing, where you live or die by clicks, and the competition grows daily. With this background, Matt knows what it takes to drive successful search marketing. His brain and willpower are going to help evolve SEOmoz’s product roadmap to meet the needs of our ever-growing user base.”

Exact terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the price was somewhere in the low seven-figure area.

In August, it acquired Twitter analytics company Followerwonk. Now, it’s search engine listing company GetListed:

SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin said, “Small businesses don’t always know where local data is hiding. They don’t understand why customers can’t find their information on the web or on their smartphones. GetListed puts power in the hands of local businesses—they make data essential to inbound marketing channels easily accessible. We’re absolutely thrilled to fight the menace of data obfuscation at their side.”

The announcement comes with this “local signage-themed ultimatum” from the companies:

Followerwonk is a tool designed to help users find, analyze and optimize for “social growth,” and that means digging into Twitter analytics (who your followers are, where they’re located, when they tweet, etc.), and finding and connecting with influencers. Fishkin sees an opportunity to bring his SEO-savvy customers this kind of data, which can help them in their SEO endeavors, which are obviously not getting any easier these days.

“I see Twitter impacting a lot of relationship building, which often leads to partnerships, links, referrals, and business development of all kinds,” Fishkin tells WebProNews. “We’re also seeing a very observable correlation directly between URLs/sites that are heavily mentioned on Twitter and enhanced performance in the search results.”

“Whether that’s a direct or indirect results is harder to know, but plenty of examples and evidence certainly exist,” he adds.

Google’s Matt Cutts actually talked a bit about social signals at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francsico this week. He briefly touched on Google’s relationship with Twitter data, since the deal the two companies once had fell apart last year.

According to a paraphrased account of the conversation from Brafton, Cutts noted that Google can’t crawl Facebook pages or Twitter accounts to see who is reputable or has real world impact as a brand. Brafton’s account of Cutts’ words continues:

People were upset when Realtime results went away! But that platform is a private service. If Twitter wants to suspend someone’s service they can. Google was able to crawl Twitter until its deal ended, and Google was no longer able to crawl those pages. As such, Google is cautious about using that as a signal – Twitter can shut it off at any time.

We’re always going to be looking for ways to identify who is valuable in the real world. We want to return quality results that have real world reputability and quality factors are key – Google indexes 20 billion pages per day.

SEOmoz may just be able to help users identify who is valuable in the real world, using Twitter data, thanks to its new acquisition. Fishkin noted in his announcement, by the way, that they may add Google+ and/or Pinterest data into the mix at some point.

“In true Moz style, the ‘Wonkers’ will become ‘Mozzers’ which will allow SEOMoz to expand its current capabilities to include a social aspect, helping customers search Twitter profiles, compare two users, and analyze them using comprehensive graphs,” a representative for SEOmoz tells WebProNews.

Earlier this year, SEOmoz secured $18 million in funding from The Foundry Group and Ignition Partners. CEO Rand Fishkin says he reached out to Followerwonk CEO Peter Bray shortly thereafter, and discussed a possible acquisition. It turns out, the two companies have been working together since June, and have been working on integration of Followerwonk into SEOmoz Pro.

“Normally, I like to be wholly transparent about everything we do here at SEOmoz, and that would include acquisitions,” says Fishkin. “However, in this case, I can’t reveal all the details around the transaction. In being empathetic to the Followerwonk crew’s personal finances, the best I can say is that the total deal value is in the low 7 figures (between 1mm and 4mm) and that it includes three items – cash upfront, ongoing cash incentives for the years the Wonk crew stay at Moz, and SEOmoz stock.”

Fishkin hints that more acquisitions are in the company’s future. He also hints that Followerwonk may expand to include Google+ and/or Pinterest data.

As we’ve been covering the SEO industry for many years, many of our readers may know her best as Rand Fishkin’s wife. Rand, as you probably know, is the CEO of SEOmoz, and as Geraldine explains, The Everywhereist is as much a love letter to her husband as it is a travel blog.

That love is on display, probably as much as it has ever been, as Geraldine has blogged about her tumor, which she has named Steve.

Follow @everywhereist

Geraldine
@everywhereist

Meet Steve, my brain tumor: http://t.co/VefRbHxx

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In her post, Geraldine writes:

As for why I named it Steve, … well, duh. What else was I going to name it? There is no one to whom I am particularly close who is named Steve. I’ve never kissed a boy named Steve. I’ve never uttered the phrase, “Steve, I love you.” And Steve is nice and short and easy to add to a long list of unrepeatable words. Behold:

See how well that works? It kind of rolls off the tongue, really. And considering how many big words we’ve had to deal with over the last couple of weeks, I’m inclined to stick to something short and sweet and monosyllabic (this must be how the Kardashians feel).

Rand comments on the post:

Fucking goddamn miserable piece-of-shit Steve.

p.s. We’re not religious, so mentions of various deities may confuse us.

Rand has also been tweeting about the situation:

Follow @randfish

Rand Fishkin
@randfish

My wife, @everywhereist has a brain tumor: http://t.co/4kBc1Rf4 It’s been a rough few weeks, but I’m so proud of how she’s handling it.

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Follow @randfish

Rand Fishkin
@randfish

I’ve been a bit of a mess, personally and professionally, apologies to the Moz team and to anyone whose emails I’ve neglected of late.

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5 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

Follow @randfish

Rand Fishkin
@randfish

Going to crash. ~30 hours until surgery. Knock on wood for us.

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Geraldine says the doctors are confident the tumor is not a not a glioma, but rather pilocytic astrocytoma. Characteristics of this, according to the National Brain Tumor Society, which Geraldine linked to, include:

• Slow growing, with relatively well-defined borders
• Grows in the cerebrum, optic nerve pathways, brain stem and cerebellum
• Occurs most often in children and teens
• Accounts for two percent of all brain tumors

The good news, Geraldine says, is that that the doctors say there’s an 80% chance that Steve is benign, and that even if the tumor is not benign, “odds are he’s still very easily treatable.”

Finding out a loved one has a brain tumor is tough news to hear. I know. I’ve lived it. I can’t imagine what it must be like to find out you have one yourself. These two have clearly kept in good spirits about the whole thing, or at least as good as anyone could keep. Considering the circumstances, the outlook seems pretty positive.

Best of luck to Geraldine and Rand.

Pretty weird.

“It looks like having a short, search-friendly title tag has increased in importance – without it, Google could replace your title with just about anything, including part of your URL,” she concludes. “This doesn’t exactly create the user experience we want, and a replaced title tag is a lost opportunity to encourage searchers to click.”

We’ve been unable to reproduce these kinds of results. We’ve had some pretty long title tags, but they don’t seem to be affecting the results in this way.

Here’s an example of a title tag, and the way it shows up in Google:

Google talked about page titles in search results a bit on its Webmaster Central blog earlier this year. I’m not sure it helps to explain much about this exact situation, but it does provide some insight into how Google handles titles:

We use many signals to decide which title to show to users, primarily the <title> tag if the webmaster specified one. But for some pages, a single title might not be the best one to show for all queries, and so we have algorithms that generate alternative titles to make it easier for our users to recognize relevant pages. Our testing has shown that these alternative titles are generally more relevant to the query and can substantially improve the clickthrough rate to the result, helping both our searchers and webmasters. About half of the time, this is the reason we show an alternative title.

Other times, alternative titles are displayed for pages that have no title or a non-descriptive title specified by the webmaster in the HTML. For example, a title using simply the word “Home” is not really indicative of what the page is about. Another common issue we see is when a webmaster uses the same title on almost all of a website’s pages, sometimes exactly duplicating it and sometimes using only minor variations. Lastly, we also try to replace unnecessarily long or hard-to-read titles with more concise and descriptive alternatives.

Matt Cutts talked about snippets in titles in a video a few years ago:

As Barr notes, some of Google’s algorithm changes for the month of May had to do with how Google handles titles as well. These included:

We talked about these a bit in the article: Google Calls Upon Tom Waits and Otis Redding To Help With Your Site’s Titles.

Barr’s advice is to use short, but keyword-rich titles in title tags, even when the titles themselves are longer. She’s even going back on “years of posts” and adding shorter titles.

“I’ve never seen it work on a truly clean, established site,” Fishkin told us at the time. He is confident enough in his sites’ link profiles and reputation. He also said, “I’d rather they target me/us than someone else. We can take the hit and we can help publicize/reach the right folks if something does go wrong. Other targets probably wouldn’t be so lucky.”

We had a conversation with Fishkin today about the Penguin update, and about a new SEOmoz project related to webspam. We also asked for an update on how the challenge is going, and he said, “On the negative SEO front – I did notice that my personal blog had ~40,000 more links (from some very questionable new sources) as of last week. It’s still ranking well, though!”

It sounds like the the challenge is working out so far, which certainly looks good on Google’s part, especially in light of the Penguin update, and the opinions flying around about negative SEO. Just peruse any comment thread or discussion forum on the topic and there’s a good chance you’ll run into some of this discussion.

I’m guessing the challenge is still on the table, but so far, Fishkin doesn’t seem top be having any problems.

Of course, most people don’t have the link profile or reputation that Fishkin has established, but that also speaks to the need for content producers to work on building both.

SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin tells WebProNews, “It’s done a nice job of waking up a lot of folks who never thought Google would take this type of aggressive, anti-manipulative action, but I think the execution’s actually somewhat less high quality than what Google usually rolls out (lots of search results that look very strange or clearly got worse, and plenty of sites that probably shouldn’t have been hit).”

SEOmoz, by the way, has launched an interesting project aimed at tackling Webpsam on its own.

Fishkin actually posted a new video discussing the Penguin update today, which is worth the watch, particularly if you’ve been affected. There are six main points he discusses, but one in particular that I found interesting is that there are a lot of sites in the marketing industry that appear to have been hit.

Fishkin says, “There appears to be a very disproportionate level of sites in the marketing/services field affected by this. What I mean is, we have seen more people write in about keywords like, ‘seo services,’ ‘seo company, you know, some particular city name’, or ‘web design services, some particular city name’. Those types of results seem to be hit heavily.”

“Now, I’m gonna throw out to things I think may be to blame here,” he continues. “One is: a lot of people who operate in these marketing services fields are also likely to have a lot of correlation with the people who are potentially getting the kinds of link spam to their web pages that Google hit in this update. So, it’s not necessarily [that] Google focused on these. It could be the types of spam they focused on and the types of links that these people had just happened to be correlated and connected. The other things is, this could merely a leading indicator…we’re obviously in the marketing and SEO field, and so it could be that we’re just getting a disproportionate number of those types of folks talking about it in Q&A, emailing, tweeting at us…all those kinds of things.”

“That’s also possible, though usually we see more balance across the board, typically,” he notes.

Beyond the obviously spam-heavy topics, like making money online and pharmaceuticals, we’d be interested to hear more about what kinds of sites have been impacted most by Penguin. Do you believe you were hit by Penguin? What industry is your site part of?

CEO Rand Fishkin announced the project on Google+ Monday evening, acknowledging that his company is “certainly not going to be as good at it or as scaled as Google,” but that it’s making for interesting research.

Fishkin tells WebProNews that Google’s Penguin update was not the motivator behind the project, though he did have this to say about the update:

“In terms of Penguin – it’s done a nice job of waking up a lot of folks who never thought Google would take this type of aggressive, anti-manipulative action, but I think the execution’s actually somewhat less high quality than what Google usually rolls out (lots of search results that look very strange or clearly got worse, and plenty of sites that probably shouldn’t have been hit).”

You can read more about Penguin via our various articles on the topic here.

“We’ve been wanting to work on this for a long time, but our data scientist was previously tied up on other items (and we’ve just hired a research assistant for the project),” Fishkin tells us. “The original catalyst was the vast quantity of emails and questions we get about whether a page/site is ‘safe’ to acquire links from, or whether certain offers (you know the kind – ‘$100 for 50 permanent text links guaranteed to boost your Google rankings!’) were worthwhile.”

“Tragically, there’s a lot of money flowing from people who can barely afford it, but don’t know better to spammers who know that what they’re building could hurt their customers, and Google refuses to take action to show which spam they know about,” he continues. “Our eventual goal is to build a metric marketers and site owners can use to get a rough sense of a site’s potential spamminess in comparison to others.”

“A score (or scores) of some kind would (eventually, assuming the project goes well) be included in Mozscape/OSE showing the spamminess of inlinks/outlinks,” he explained in the Google+ announcement.

According to Fishkin, the SEOmoz algorithms will be conservative and focus on the most obvious and manipulative forms of spam. “For example, we’d probably catch a lot of very obvious/bad link farms, but not necessarily many private blog networks or paid links from reputable sites,” he said in response to a comment on his Google+ post.

Also in the comments, Fishkin indicated that data would be presented in a ‘matches patterns of sites we’ve seen Google penalize/ban” kind of way than a “‘you are definitely webspam’ type of thing.”

The data scientist Fishkin spoke of will present the findings at the company’s Mozcon event in July. Fishin expects an actual product launch late this year or early next year.

Earlier this month, the company announced that it has raised $18 million in VC funding.

“SEOmoz is one of those companies that you just know is going to do big things, “ said Brad Feld, Managing Director of The Foundry Group. “I tend to judge the organizations I invest in based on character, culture and leadership. I believe Moz has exceptional depth in all these areas and the financial growth trajectory to back them up. The relationship is a great fit from all angles and I’m positive we have a very successful future ahead of us.”

The software that SEOmoz creates crawls websites to find errors or missed opportunities for SEO and then makes recommendations based on SEO best practices. The startup also helps websites battle negative SEO. SEOmoz has 15,000 current paying subscribers and predicts it will take in $18-20 million in 2012.

In addition to the highly detailed blog announcement that tells the entire story of the funding, SEOmoz has put out an official press release that is littered with internet memes. One example can be seen below, and represents the tenuous explanation for their less-than-serious release. The rest of the memes, which, I must warn you, are not all winners, can be seen here.

Despite the silly press release, SEOmoz is sincerely hoping this investment will allow their startup to grow and flourish. “In that first phone call with Brad, I knew we’d found someone special,” said Fishkin. “I was, honestly, scared of starting another fundraising process after our previous two attempts, but the chemistry between Foundry and Moz was instant – we couldn’t ask for a better fit. This new partnership coupled with the continued support of our original investors, Ignition Partners, gives us the ability to achieve some remarkable milestones in the years to come.”

How do you feel about companies that cast their SEO magic on websites? Should all companies be less serious about their press releases? Leave a comment below and let us know.