MOZ Lays Off 30% Of It's Employees And The Real Reason Is...

[Deleted member 708208]

So I am sure it's no secret to the my fellow members here Moz has laid of a large portion of it's employees. That's just news that comes and goes. They claim it was all for Doubling Down On Search and a restructuring of the company.

Anyone with a brain can translate that into "We are losers and our products didn't work."

Of course they're going to put a nice face on it and act out the tears of laying off labor that apparently didn't make them any money. Got it. Now a decent portion of those workers are reentering the for hire labor force for the first time in awhile with this nifty little website.

They claim that their local SEO products are doing great. In my opinion the MozLocal tool is an overpriced piece of shit, but that review is for another time. Here's the point I am getting to.

Do you think Moz has finally realized the only success it's had is within it's metric calculation? Of course DA/PA which can be easily manipulated captures the hearts of noobs and is an OK metric when you know how to really manually check a website. (I prefer Majestic anyway.)

Next, what do you think the state of the economy is in this industry?

In my opinion the digital economy as I would call is usually has a delayed impact when the stocks, housing markets, and local businesses are having hard times. Local towns are seeing ma and pa shops just go away. So again what is your opinion of the "State of inbound" as MOZ would say?

Besides charging too much for too little do you think their layoffs are a side-effect of a larger issue? How would someone say from 2007 on this board compare everything to today?

 

[jacker818]

Ahrefs > MOZ all day. Their prices are jacked up.

 

[Angry Old Man]

Just look at the link count returns for Ahrefs vs Moz and you have your answer!

 

[The Curator]

I like the discussion topic, saw the site, they should create an upwork company profile and pool together. I didn't really see content planning amongst them, and only one GD'er.
As far as the state of the economy, you will always have a subset of the population of available prospects that will not take action based on the state of the economy, where some will double down because as Rothschild says, "the best time to buy is when there's blood in the streets", or something to that nature.
Some of the top companies today were created during recessions and depressions, so you just have to look for prospects that understand you need to take a risk and do it now, or someone else will.
I know for many on here including myself, business is good, so the question is, will you give in to the fear objection or will you press their greed button?
Regarding Moz, I am surprised they haven't been bought out like other digital marketing businesses like Contently.

 

[Zwielicht]

I used to really like Moz's toolbar and metrics, but since the beginning of this year, both their Chrome toolbar and their metrics have been, for lack of a better term, "broken". I'm going to be lazy and just quote myself here:

Since around January of 2016, the Moz toolbar has been broken. Despite all of the complaints, Moz has yet to fix the ongoing issues surrounding its plugin including, but not limited to:

• Metrics not being displayed
• Graphical glitches
• The toolbar interfering with page elements on certain websites
• Issues surrounding logging in to use the metrics, only to discover that the toolbar doesn’t detect that you’re logged in.

As for the metrics, while I understand that these 3rd party metrics are meant to be estimations of a site's ranking potential, Moz's metrics seem to have a problem that Ahrefs doesn't. I'm not sure what causes it specifically, but I've noticed that every site I switch to HTTPS on ostensibly loses their PA and DA (if I recall correctly, Moz wasn't even picking up 5% of the backlinks of the sites I checked anytime after the switch). This didn't happen with Ahrefs, so I switched to their toolbar immediately after.

Anyway, it's unfortunate that those workers got laid off.

 

[Floopa75]

Bosses at tech companies in the US will go to incredible lengths to seem like the nice guys. Reality is most of them are egotistical morons.. This is just another example of that.

I agree, their product was shite. The investors probably pulled the C level execs aside and told them to smarten up. Have you ever watched tour videos of places like Google, Dropbox, etc? Looks like playgrounds, not work places. Can't imagine a suit's brain who has a MBA from some Ivy League school after working with tech companies. Aneurysms, probably.

As far as the economy in this industry, billions maybe even trillions flow through this industry every year. There's always room for great products, but as time goes on the room for shitty products gets smaller and smaller. Always money to be made.

Edit: don't want to be a dick but most of the people on the "Meet the Mozzers" site look like a bunch of rejects.

 

[Zwielicht]

Bosses at tech companies in the US will go to incredible lengths to seem like the nice guys. Reality is most of them are egotistical morons.. This is just another example of that.

I agree, their product was shite. The investors probably pulled the C level execs aside and told them to smarten up. Have you ever watched tour videos of places like Google, Dropbox, etc? Looks like playgrounds, not work places. Can't imagine a suit's brain who has a MBA from some Ivy League school after working with tech companies. Aneurysms, probably.

As far as the economy in this industry, billions maybe even trillions flow through this industry every year. There's always room for great products, but as time goes on the room for shitty products gets smaller and smaller. Always money to be made.

Edit: don't want to be a dick but most of the people on the "Meet the Mozzers" site look like a bunch of rejects.

No kidding about that. There's even a slide and a fire pole in one of the buildings

Although I won't lie, I'd probably want to work there.

 

[asap1]

Moz crawls too damn slow, if they upped the speed then they would be half useful.

The metrics do help tho if you know what you are doing.

 

[davids355]

I think Moz have just stuck themselves in the wrong place. They are one of the more expensive tools Bu actually are offering the least. And so they try to add value with Moz local and various other addons but none of them are much good.

I think they really wanted to be the biggest thing in SEO and probably geared themselves up for that staff wise, but it didn't work out and now they are feeling it.

The economy as a whole, sure it's got to be suffering a bit like everything else - companies in general are pulling at the purse strings because of all the uncertainty and I guess advertising budgets, which is really what SEO is to a company, are one of the things to go first - which is a false economy because less advertising = less growth, but I think that's what happens.

More so in the uk where I am from I think gov needs to sort it out and someone needs to stand up and take the rains.

 

[Capo Dei Capi]

Bosses at tech companies in the US will go to incredible lengths to seem like the nice guys. Reality is most of them are egotistical morons.. This is just another example of that.

I agree, their product was shite. The investors probably pulled the C level execs aside and told them to smarten up. Have you ever watched tour videos of places like Google, Dropbox, etc? Looks like playgrounds, not work places. Can't imagine a suit's brain who has a MBA from some Ivy League school after working with tech companies. Aneurysms, probably.

As far as the economy in this industry, billions maybe even trillions flow through this industry every year. There's always room for great products, but as time goes on the room for shitty products gets smaller and smaller. Always money to be made.

Edit: don't want to be a dick but most of the people on the "Meet the Mozzers" site look like a bunch of rejects.

All the established tech companies did just fine with developing products without any of the gimmicks at the work place that the new companies says is needed.

 

[Banned member 185991]

LEAVE RAND ALONE!!!

​

 

[Sombrero]

SEO is dead.

 

[JV1999]

I haven't tried Ahrefs, but MOZ shows up in the first page of google and is consistently first result or second.

That's why I do Moz lol, but they're not free, so I do seosmalltools.

 

[Deleted member 708208]

I used to really like Moz's toolbar and metrics, but since the beginning of this year, both their Chrome toolbar and their metrics have been, for lack of a better term, "broken". I'm going to be lazy and just quote myself here:

As for the metrics, while I understand that these 3rd party metrics are meant to be estimations of a site's ranking potential, Moz's metrics seem to have a problem that Ahrefs doesn't. I'm not sure what causes it specifically, but I've noticed that every site I switch to HTTPS on ostensibly loses their PA and DA (if I recall correctly, Moz wasn't even picking up 5% of the backlinks of the sites I checked anytime after the switch). This didn't happen with Ahrefs, so I switched to their toolbar immediately after.

Anyway, it's unfortunate that those workers got laid off.

Bosses at tech companies in the US will go to incredible lengths to seem like the nice guys. Reality is most of them are egotistical morons.. This is just another example of that.

I agree, their product was shite. The investors probably pulled the C level execs aside and told them to smarten up. Have you ever watched tour videos of places like Google, Dropbox, etc? Looks like playgrounds, not work places. Can't imagine a suit's brain who has a MBA from some Ivy League school after working with tech companies. Aneurysms, probably.

As far as the economy in this industry, billions maybe even trillions flow through this industry every year. There's always room for great products, but as time goes on the room for shitty products gets smaller and smaller. Always money to be made.

Edit: don't want to be a dick but most of the people on the "Meet the Mozzers" site look like a bunch of rejects.

I think Moz have just stuck themselves in the wrong place. They are one of the more expensive tools Bu actually are offering the least. And so they try to add value with Moz local and various other addons but none of them are much good.

I think they really wanted to be the biggest thing in SEO and probably geared themselves up for that staff wise, but it didn't work out and now they are feeling it.

The economy as a whole, sure it's got to be suffering a bit like everything else - companies in general are pulling at the purse strings because of all the uncertainty and I guess advertising budgets, which is really what SEO is to a company, are one of the things to go first - which is a false economy because less advertising = less growth, but I think that's what happens.

More so in the uk where I am from I think gov needs to sort it out and someone needs to stand up and take the rains.

All three of you have raised great points about MOZ and I am in agreement. @Zwielicht it is unfortunate because you know there's some talent in
that group, but their talent does not suffice when a companies entrepreneurial capabilities are vanishing. I can't complain because business has
been excellent and I know a lot of people doing very well too, but some local areas are hit pretty hard and along with that agencies.

I was thinking it could have been a combination of factors for MOZ.

 

[jazzc]

Of course they're going to put a nice face on it and act out the tears of laying off labor that apparently didn't make them any money. Got it. Now a decent portion of those workers are reentering the for hire labor force for the first time in awhile with this nifty little website.

Unsurprisingly, the amount of software engineers in that group is ... zero. On the contrary, it's mostly UX, HR and management. Looks like they're in a cash crunch and are trimming the fat as a consequence.

 

[Deleted member 708208]

Unsurprisingly, the amount of software engineers in that group is ... zero. On the contrary, it's mostly UX, HR and management. Looks like they're in a cash crunch and are trimming the fat as a consequence.

You're right that doesn't look much like taking a new direction with projects. I really do think either the economy hit them or they
did this to themselves. Sure does toss some pressure over to employees working for similar companies.