Finally, someone did an interview with one of the best and brightest in the industry. Thanks to Mr. Pratt (he's fond of that moniker, apparently), Bill Slawski, one of my favorite people, is featured today on SEOBuzzBox.

I do take issue with Pratt's first statement, though:

Bill Slawski is one of the lesser known SEO’s, he has a blog called SEO by the Sea.

Lesser known my ass (pardon the language, I'm slightly incensed)! Bill is probably a generation earlier in the SEO game than I am and, while he may not be quite as well read as some other folks, his name is one that's known to nearly everyone in the industry. He's not only writing at his own blog, he also blogs for SearchEngineWatch (the industry's best read online publication) and speaks on search algos at the major conferences in NYC and San Jose.

OK, enough ranting. Go read the interview. Some juicy bits below:

It doesn’t say that a link is a vote. That’s an assumption made in the early days of Backrub. There is a benefit to using links and hypertext analysis to index the unstructured documents on the web. But, by doing so, by indexing and measuring based upon links, the meaning of a link has been transformed from a reference to a vote.

I see that transformation, from reference to popularity contest as unnatural. Of course, there is no right to be listed and indexed in Google, but the search engine’s popularity means that if you want to be found on the web, being in Google is important. And that means paying attention to their definition of links.

And,

I have been spending a few weeks in Google Sitemaps Group reading people’s concerns and have noticed that 99% of the time people who complain of going up and down in the SERPS do not have a 301 redirect set to “www” or their domain without the “www” in the URL. Again, even Matt Cutts wishes that canonical issues and .htaccess were easier for admins, he also said that the Big Daddy Datacenter would improve upon canonicals but the word “improve” does not mean “fix” correct? What is it about Google’s algorithm that makes it choke while Yahoo and MSN seem to be getting it right?

The guy's famous for a reason (and no, it's not his haircut).