The SEOmoz Marketplace, born in early 2007, passed away peacefully in January 2012. Cause of death: Old, out-dated code, 5 year old design, manual spam maintenance and was ridden with unfixable bugs. The Marketplace lived a very full life and helped many people find their perfect SEO job, while giving companies a place to show their stuff. Our dear Marketplace was loved by all and spammed by many.
A service is being held in his honor today, here on the SEOmoz blog to bid farewell to our good pal. Please feel free to say a little something in the comments, and let Marketplace know just how much you cared.
Wait... What?
When it comes to our Marketplace, let's be honest, we haven't put our best foot forward lately. When it made its first appearance back in 2007 it was a great addition to our site and for our community. As we have grown, the Marketplace always seemed to be one area of our website that was neglected and as you can see from the screenshots below it's a few design revisions behind. Today we are announcing that the Marketplace will be closing its doors next week.
But don't fret! We will be keeping our Recommend List (the most visited page in the Marketplace) and will give it a brand new look and feel. Over the past few weeks we've worked on putting together a comprehensive list of companies we recommend. There is some amazing talent out there! More details about getting on the recommend list will be included when the new list is released.
A Look Back
Over the years, the Marketplace did its job (hehe get it.. job.. ok nevermind) well but recently it has fallen into despair a bit. Not only is the design old, but it has put a strain on other systems, causing the site to slow down. The current Marketplace wasn't built to scale with the growth we have seen in the past couple years, and we're feeling the strain now. For example, there are pages that do not paginate, pages that don't cache, database queries that are not optimized, and additional pages that open our website to attacks. Take a peek at the amazing transormation it has seen in the past 4-5 years (aka none).
Marketplace 2007/2008
Marketplace 2012
Along with the design that hasn't changed, the code that powers the Marketplace is outdated and tired as well. The system has many bugs that cause things not to work and provide a poor user experience that we are not proud of. Currently our resources are strained building an amazing product for the community and sometimes things need to get cut. In the future we hope to add additional features into our user profiles that our users can use to promote themselves but we have yet to decide what will get done.
The Marketplace was also a very well known place to spam and without a process of detecting that spam it became a very labor-intensive process that we have a problem keeping up with. Our Marketplace was meant for a place to list your internet marketing company but it seemed that one of our favorite many plumbers found it a great place to spam also.
Alternatives
In place of our Marketplace we are encouraging you to utilize Linkedin. Post your job on your company page and then you are welcome to share it in our SEOmoz group.
A Note About "Old" Q&A
On another note, for those members who have been around for a while will remember our original Q&A system. We will also be making a change to the way that old system works. Currently those questions are all publicly available but will be removed from public view along with the Marketplace. The top viewed questions will be migrated over to our new system and the other questions will be removed in 6 months. If you are a long time member and have questions you would like to keep, please copy them into a safe place as they will be removed in 6 months. All of your old questions can be found here.
Final Note
We would like to thank everyone who has participated in the Marketplace and would love to hear any success stories that you have had there. Additionally, if you have other great resources that may help community members find work, please leave those suggestions in the comments.
Oh nooooo!
That means I have to lie these lines of code to rest as well:
if ($this->form->isSeoSpam()) { $this->redirect('https://www.seomoz.org/marketplace');}
public function isSeoSpam() { $value = strtolower($this->getValue('text')); if (strpos($value, ' seo') !== FALSE || strpos($value, "\nseo") !== FALSE) { $count = 0; $count += strpos($value, 'google') !== FALSE ? 1 : 0; $count += strpos($value, 'engines') !== FALSE ? 1 : 0; $count += strpos($value, 'rankings') !== FALSE ? 1 : 0; $count += strpos($value, 'traffic') !== FALSE ? 1 : 0; return $count >= 2; } return false;}
They were meant for all these obnoxious contact form submission from componies telling me that my "homepage pagerank is low"..
You can always redirect to the recommended list.... =)
I actually don't see this being a big change. I think the linkedIn approach is the more professional, and the best for most SEO companies sales teams.
I agree that linkedIn is the more professional way to go! +1
Love the eulogy. That was beautifully funny.
I like that we never even changed the photo of Rand. Casey it's hard to take this post seriously with that big smile on your face in your photo. I don't think you're sad at all.
Sorry, i'll work on not smiling soo much...
Jen and Casey, you should know that you can find that photo somewhere as Rand avatar in YouMoz, for an experiment he tried few years ago.
I've always wondered what this was for and felt that it's never quite worked. Good to see something better will be put in its place.
Ah, this is too bad. I know of at least 2 occasions where previous clients contacted me after they found us here on the marketplace.
While it's great the "recommended list" will be resuscitated, I think it unfortunately is biased to companies that do the "right networking" in order to get on the list and don't give the "little guys" (or gals) who are starting in the business a chance like we got a while back when the marketplace at least allowed us to be there. We also got a few recommendations as well which gave us at least the 2 calls that we recall.
I, for one, thought the marketplace "was" a good thing.
Today i was finding marketplace page but its really shockful to me when i come to know of closing of this page.
Now i will use linkedin.
I've always wondered what this was for and felt that it's never quite worked. Good to see something better will be put in its place.
Kind of wish this was still around. I'm getting away from client-side SEO and wanted some good firms to recommend to people.
We do still have our Recommended List available at https://www.seomoz.org/marketplace/companies/recommended. Hope that helps!
Linked-in is good but here on SEO Moz it seems a little tricky to edit you profile for the linkedin part. The suffix ends with linkedin.com/in/... so you can't add your company page
Looks great - any idea on how many people look at the Jobs board? We have a few vacancies.
Also keen to see details on how to apply to get on the recommended list.
Linked-in is good but here on SEO Moz it seems a little tricky to edit you profile for the linkedin part. The suffix ends with linkedin.com/in/... so you can't add your company page.
The member profile https://www.seomoz.org/users/profile/ is being spammed as well. A lot of people just signs up and post their links and never logged in again. Maybe that can be cleaned up as well?
We often find a large number of these and tend to ban them if we don't see any activity on the account or spammy activity but we tend to be on the safe side with most accounts and only ban if we know they are spam. If you run across anything you think is suspect please feel free to email me.
i have received a handful of spam messages through the 'private message center' on SEOmoz. Has anyone else reported this?
Yes we do end up banning a few accounts a week due to PM spam. If you ever get any hit the "Mark as SPAM" button and it sends us a note to look at the user.
Great to know that you are aware of it and have a protocol in place, Thanks Casey!!
The bitter irony of Rand's last sentence:
"It's a match made in search industry heaven"
Goodbye marketplace!
Yes, I remember - I have seen that before.
Astonishing that you still have resources left - even for a marketplace.
Just submitted to the market place. Last submission ever? Maybe.
cool, will send a private message whenever I find some.
AMEN
p.d.: curious to see the new and renewed Reccomended List, as it is honestly the best justified alternative to the infamous TopSEOs list for all the businesses out there looking for reviews of SEO agencies/professionals.
Ah... and shame I loose a good backlink :P
Good old TopSEO's. Maybe they should rename it to 'TheseSEOsPaidUsTheMost'.
This was a great post. How times are changing...
Just an FYI for those wondering - we are rebuilding a new and improved version of the Recommended List, and that will continue to live on as a free resource.
p.s. I always loved how it ranks #1 for this.
This sounds more like an autopsy report than a service, but I agree with your findings, Casey :)
My thoughts after reading were, "market what?" and "this recommended list is full of terrible, non-existent, and miscategorized companies." Sounds like you guys are already on it.
Psst... for me ranks #2 after HGCA ;)... personalized SERPs maybe?
For me ranks #3 ... anyway