As many of you know, Moz recently went through a major reorganization, which included the loss of 28% of our staff. Our Community team was heavily impacted, which has understandably led to speculation about the future of the Moz Community. I want to specifically address those concerns, project by project. The Moz Community is an essential part of our past and future, and while we can’t ignore the reality and difficulty of our recent losses, we believe strongly in our Community and are doing our best to chart a path forward.
A personal note
I asked to write this post, knowing it wouldn’t be easy. I’ve been a member of the Moz Community for almost 10 years. When my first YouMoz post was promoted in April 2007, I didn’t realize it would be the start of a decade-long journey. The Moz Community made my career in SEO possible, and I’ll always be grateful for that.
The people affected by the past few weeks are my peers and friends, and I take that loss personally. It’s ok to take that personally. At the same time, there are 160 peers and friends still at Moz trying to figure out how to do more with less, and they believe in our Community, too. We will make mistakes along the way, and we will need your help.
I and the entire Moz team would also like to thank the departing members of the Community team – Jen, Erica, Charlene, and Matt – for all of their contributions over the years building and maintaining a thriving community. This has been a month of difficult decisions driven by both unpleasant financial realities and shifts in Moz strategy, but we do not take their contributions for granted.
A few clarifications
Before diving in project-by-project, I’d like to clarify a few points. First, we did not lose the entire Community team – Megan and Danielle are still at Moz, and they’ve been with the team since 2011 and 2013, respectively. They know our Community well.
The day-to-day of our main blog is (and has been) run by members of our Audience Development team (Trevor and Felicia, with the help of the Marketing team), which is separate from the Community team. Moz Q&A and Social are a joint effort between Community, Customer Support, and a group of dedicated industry experts known as Moz Associates. It takes a lot of hard-working, dedicated people to create a world-class community.
The Big List
Here is a list of all of our major Moz Community-focused projects, and the status of those projects as best we know today. I will try to be as transparent as possible.
(1) MozCon 2016
Please be assured that MozCon 2016 is full speed ahead. Erica and Charlene graciously agreed to stay with Moz through the conference, and everything will proceed as originally planned. We look forward to seeing many of you in Seattle next week. When you see them, please thank Erica and Charlene for everything they’ve done to make MozCon a great event.
(2) MozCon 2017
We’ve had many conversations about MozCon 2017 in the past two weeks, and have committed to moving forward with our flagship event. As originally planned, MozCon 2017 will take place in Seattle, from July 17–19. We realize that an event of the size and quality of MozCon is not an easy thing to pull off, but we have many team members who have been actively involved in past events and we will collectively work hard to maintain the MozCon tradition.
(3) Moz Blog
Before Moz was a company and long before it was a product, there was a blog. The Moz Blog has our full support, will remain a core part of our Community, and we will continue to support and update big content projects, including The Beginner’s Guide to SEO. We are 100% committed to maintaining strong educational resources for the SEO community.
(4) YouMoz
Prior to the reorganization, we had started some difficult conversations about YouMoz. As our Community and the entire world of content marketing has evolved, the quantity of submissions has increased while the quality has suffered. This left our team spending a large amount of time on managing the queue and editing posts. It also meant that good posts had to wait longer to be published, frustrating our best contributors.
In the near future, YouMoz will be phased out in favor of a better guest contributor process and system for the Moz Blog. Our hope is to offer guest authors higher-profile opportunities on the main blog. We will also be exploring ways to allow our community to pitch blog topic ideas without submitting an entire post, to save everyone time and frustration.
I have a long, personal history with YouMoz, and this is a difficult decision, but as a content marketer I also know that our world has changed dramatically in the past couple of years. We will do our best to adapt to those changes and give our Community the chance to contribute in meaningful ways.
(5) Moz Q&A
A few months back, we started looking for a new technology platform for the Q&A forum, one that could better serve our evolving community. Those plans will continue forward. Our Community team is working hard to launch a better Q&A engine that can support both our Moz Pro and Moz Local customer communities, as well as the broader SEO community. We are fully committed to a new and improved Q&A in the coming months that supports a wide range of SEO conversations and helps the next generation of marketers grow in their careers.
(6) Social media
Obviously, the Community team had a huge hand in growing and managing our various social channels. Many of those channels have also changed, with Facebook pushing hard toward paid inclusion and Google+ facing an uncertain future. Megan, Danielle, and our Customer Support team are committed to actively supporting Twitter and our other existing channels, even as we look for the best ways to engage our Community in the broader social world.
We will continue to explore new channels, such as Instagram, as well as better ways to engage with old channels, including LinkedIn. Thanks to support teams in the UK and Australia, we will soon have 24/7 social coverage on major channels.
The coming months
Ultimately, our commitment to the Moz Community will be judged by our actions in the coming weeks and months and not just by our words. Our resources are more constrained now, but our dedication is as strong as ever. I’d like to thank all of you for supporting us over the years, and I hope that you will continue this journey with us as we explore the future of the industry and the Community.
If you have specific questions or concerns, please feel free to ask in the comments, and I will do my best to address them (or find someone on our team who can). We look forward to seeing many of you at MozCon next week!
Glad to see this post, and glad you wrote it. I was fortunate (having worked there for a week) to see the scale of your teams, but that was just me. Writing this probably gives a lot of people clarity and a sigh of relief that Moz is still deeply committed to community. But like all things in business it has to be sustainable.
Glad to see you all are willing to have tough conversations about value vs effort vs ethos. There is what you believe, what you do that drives value, and the effort to do that and sometimes the juice isn't worth the squeeze, and we get so attached to these things we don't make the right decisions until its too late.
I'll let ya with this dude, I hope I never have to go through layoffs, EVER, but I think the way you all have handled this gives a LOT of us who may someday face such things a blueprint to follow. From Sarah's Message to how people got together, to how well you all supported one another. I know its hard, but your transparency here at least can serve as a model to educate others. Not emulate, but educate, every company has their own ethos and their own way, but when that time comes for businesses - these posts will be here for people to reference and learn from, thank you to you, Sarah, Rand, etc for being open - that openness at times of good and bad tells us who you really are. You all take a lot of arrows as a result (that is the price), but you've never done the easy thing which is to get quieter during times of struggle but stay vocal at your victories.
Keep at it, keep building. See you next week :)
Thanks, Wil.
I hope to see many of you at MozCon to say goodbye to my official role at Moz. Though I will always be part of the Moz community as I was before I joined staff. :)
If you are hiring and thinking that you might want to grab some former Mozzers: HireMoz.com
Having worked as an associate with the community team for 2 years I can say that the community is in fantastic hands with Megan and Danielle.
Thanks, Melissa! That means a lot to me. :-)
As a published YouMozzer, it is very sad to see that feature go. I often found the posts on YouMoz more relatable to my business problems than the (still brilliant) thought leadership on the main blog, especially some of the case studies and 'hacks'. Its usefulness is a testament to the YouMoz editors who really knew what was important to its community. Hopefully, contributors like myself will get another opportunity to share our thoughts on the site in the future. Wish all those leaving Moz the best of luck.
My hope is that the intent of YouMoz can be preserved as the format changes. The format has been struggling for a while, but the idea of publishing high-quality contributions from our Community is very important. I agree, too, that you all often have a different and more in-the-trenches perspective, and that's very valuable.
How soon will the change happen? If I am about ready to submit an article to YouMoz would it make sense for me to wait?
Yeah, I'm going to miss YouMoz as well. :-(
Hi Daniel, PopArt
As the person who has headed YouMoz for nearly two years, I can tell you that the decision was made with the community in mind. When I took the position, our acceptance rate was 3%. My thinking was that, if we could get the acceptance to 20-25%, we'd be able to get posts on the blog daily.
I was wrong.
Even once the acceptance rate was at 27%, the number of posts making it to the blog remained unchanged, in large part because of something I had not foreseen: Many (most) authors won't return posts that are set back with questions.
It was at that point that we began to think of better ways to serve the community.
Though we don't have a solution finalized and in place, do know that it will be created/delivered with the community top-of-mind.
RS
Here's hoping it will live on in other ways.
Hey Ronell,
It is clear that YouMoz had its unique challenges regarding contributors and the very fact that you get back to contributors at all with changes and instructions is more than many other editors do on other sites.
Quality and integrity were obviously important for YouMoz and it shows in the published content on the blog. My experience with you personally was that the communication was excellent and constructive. I look at the behaviour of other SEO communities (some subreddits for example) and I'm appalled at how negative we can be to each other in the industry. I feel the community on MOZ is different and that makes it special.
It fosters a culture of learning and contribution and this great community is a testament to you and your team. You guys should be very proud at this achievement.
Thanks for the update. As a (former) active member of the community some reflections:
1. Youmoz / Moz blog. Personally I think it's a great idea to merge both blogs into one. I went to the process of publishing a post on Youmoz. I was happy when it got published, but a bit disappointed with the lack of visibility (and the small amount of pageviews). The YouMoz blog is not very visible on site & I had the impression that if a post isn't picked up by someone with "influence" (read huge number of followers) you're not getting a lot of visibility. It would however be a pity to drop the input from the community. Personally I think that a lot of the entries in the YouMoz part are more refreshing & interesting than their counterparts from established publishers on the Moz blog. In my personal opinion, too many posts on the main blog don't meet the criteria mentioned for YouMoz (user survey & YouMoz Guidelines). Pitching is probably a good idea - other criteria could include previous activity on Moz and/or quality of previously published articles). It would be good to apply the pitching concept as well to the "established" editors.
2. Q&A - a new technical solution is certainly needed. Stackoverflow could serve as an example. I was very active on the Moz Q&A last year and was astonished to see how the same questions are posted again & again (taking into account that the audience of Moz is working on SEO they don't seem to search for answers themselves). At least 50% of the questions in the Q&A can be answered just by searching Google (rewrite rules, 301 redirects,... - Matt (who unfortunately had to leave Moz) did a very nice post on that). Stackoverflow is probably less polite & TAGFEE, but in my opinion better organised & to the point. It would also be a good idea to involve the community more in the management of the Q&A. It seems a very common pattern that people are active in the Q&A and stop once they get their free MozCon ticket at 5000 points (plead guilty to that one). More involvement could keep them on board (management is now reserved to Associates & Moz team).
A last note on the community in general - I sometimes get the impression that the focus is too much on the the first E (Empathic) from the TAGFEE code - and a bit too little on the G part (over deliver). It's great to be nice & empathic, but I sometimes get the feeling that you can only write comments on posts if they are positive. As soon as you post a more critical remark it's getting down voted. In the end, this is killing all discussions and all you get is "Nice post" type of comments.
See you next week!
Let me second the call for using StackOverflow as a sterling example. SO gets a lot of things right
1. Q&A should be just that. Right now, Moz has a forum, not a Q&A. Forums are great (I got started years ago, like, Rand did, on SEOChat) but they also promote a LOT of noise and force you to find the signal somewhere. Moz avoids some of that by being a gated forum, but it's still a forum.
2. Community moderation. It's amazing to see SO empowers its valued (as measured by reputation, their version of MozPoints). It helps filter out the noise and get you more signal.
3. Better syntax. Right now, adding a link to Q&A is PAINFUL. Formatting is equally painful. Spacing, highlighting, quoting... Moz does none of these well. You're using Tiny MCE to build HTML. SO uses Markdown. It takes some getting used to, but I rarely struggle to do what I want. Try adding two returns and then deleting one in Moz...
4. Editing. SO keeps EVERYTHING. And it versions edits. Right now, all the edits do is "Edited by XXX on YYY". Versioning helps a TON, especially if someone edits the question to change the meaning.
Incidentally, great MozCon 2016!
P.D. to the post: people should also remember that Moz also can rely on what its Associates can do with their dedicated time.
I have a comment about 5) Q & A:
1) Being at the intersect of Moz Pro and Moz Local I would love to see this fusion.
2) I have been a lot more active in the Q & A community in the past, when I had a lot more time for this on my hands. I still have the desire to jump back into it however its been harder and harder lately. Part of the reason is that the Q & A community is still very much desktop based for me, on the iPhone it just does not work for me yet. Its only when I am at a desktop I can tackle some of the questions. Can you consider looking into ideally an app, web app, or at least adding some for push notifications, or a way to stay plugged into the discussion based on relevant topics or sub industry focus topics and be notified while on the go?
Thanks for listening!
+1 :) Love idea of getting more of our community activities working better on mobile.
Thank you for sharing this with us. I like you guys being so transparent, and even though I will surely miss the departing group - I am sure you will make room for their posts in the future as well.
Say hi to Erica for me.
ATB
Hi! :) <3
Hi! :)
Too bad to see you leave. However, I'm sure I will see more of you in the future - for a great future is ahead of you.
ATB,
PopArt Studio
Hi Peter
I can't believe that there is so much going on at there. Surprised to see such action from Moz. However, taking it positive to understand more batterness will come to this community.
While I'll miss the YouMoz blog itself, I'll happily welcome the ability to pitch an idea for a post instead of writing one and waiting and waiting for it to publish.
Moz rocks and has for a long time, and will continue to do so. I think that a small piece of this is what our industry is and that is evolution and growth. It is great to see the team effort in ensuring the quality of future products and respect to those that have to leave.
Cheers for the insight Pete.
As a business, it has to be a sustainable model that will allow for growth and I completely understand hard decisions sometimes have to be made, even if they are difficult and affect others.
The post has certainly settled my fears that some of my favourite parts of Moz will remain, even if they change form a little. It is the blog and the community that got me hooked in the first place.
As for YouMoz, I agree you may need to sort the wheat from the chaff to allow the quality, relevant and helpful articles to remain and be posted, could this element be out sourced to the top ranking community members or those who sign up to help, whom could possible rank the quality of the articles that come in, using some kind of scoring system for specific criteria: Helpfulness, readability, function, value etc. Only those that are of a high enough standard could then be forwarded to the required people at Moz for publishing/approval.
Not sure if that helps or not...
Cheers for the article and clarification.
Tim
We're definitely open to suggestions. One thought is that we may let people submit and vote on topics, to save time on both sides. That way, both we and the author will know that the topic resonates before either side commits a lot of time and energy, and then we can all focus our efforts better.
This may be silly--but I always saw YouMoz as a barrier to contributing to Moz. Why would I go out of my way to write a full post and then maybe have it promoted to the main Moz blog, when I publish to Search Engine Land or another major publication and guarantee the success of my post.
Hi Peter
I understand that changes are new forms of life and above all new opportunities to continue doing things.
I can only say that en hora buena for the great work they do and I hope that you continue doing so for many years
This definitely answered a few of my questions, so thank you for taking the time to clarify. It's certainly sad news, but I'm optimistic that the future of the Moz community is bright.
It will be interesting to see what becomes of YouMoz and Q&A in the coming months.
Thanks for the transparency. Onwards & upwards! I'm confident that the leaders at Moz will do what's best.
We'll be there to support or contribute to the community with best we can.
I'm delighted to be on board with Moz, it's an absolute pleasure being here. Thanks for a great article, and exceptional read indicating the Awesomeness of Moz.
Very hard to find of the moz feature, but I joined 3 years ago, I just check it now, really deep. Thanks Dr. Peter
Good luck everybody!
Thanks for providing such a great SEO tool.
To address your comment on the time it takes to review submissions, is there any way that you could ask contributors to review say 2 other submission for each submission they make? People who have previously had a post accepted could skip this review, but new people who receive say 2 votes of less than 7/10 could automatically be rejected. This might risk very occasional high quality blogs being refused, but most good ones would get through the initial review. You would obviously need to provide guidelines on how to judge the quality of content.
Alternatively there's bound to be some grammar and spelling checkers that measure the quality of an article. If you're rejecting a lot of articles because the grammar's not great, rather than because the overall research and meaning isn't great, perhaps there's a way to automate this part of it?
HI Pete,
all the best to you and your company.
I am member round about 8 years, please don´t kill the public member profile. I think it is useful. It is a way to give some reward for the feedback you earned to improve your tools and knowledge. I have often suggest other SEO Tools providers to follow your best practice.
Did you guys work on Youmoz as I see that the last blog posted on October 26th, 2016? Please update
Moz is best platform for SEO but not for begginers.
I would really like to see a Q&A section specific to Moz Local. As an owner of my first local business, a new subscriber to Moz Local, and an SEO newbie trying to tackle it all, it would be very helpful to have a dedicated Q&A section for Local. Thanks for the hard work! Good luck moving forward with the leaner operation.
Also, I'd really like to contribute via blog my perspective on learning and tackling SEO from scratch as the owner of a new local business - what I've found useful, what I've struggled with, what I've accomplished, etc. There are countless others in my same shoes, afraid of ther SEO world. I think my perspective will be relatable to a lot of your readers and subscribers.
Caleb Wetherell
So many conflicting points of view. Its very difficult to pinpoint the correct one, if there is such a thing. I hear the things like following all over the internet of things and here in the Moz Community:
"Content is king, links are dead."
AND
"No, you can create all the content you want, links are still everything in SEO."
It seems that both must be wrong, because both are equally, or at least close to equally important. It seems maybe content has become more important as of recent changes at Google, and that other changes at Google regarding backlinks have misled people into thinking that links are less important when in reality they are just as important, but have rather been given a more strict set of rules for maintaining their value. Links now need to be place with "make sense" anchors into "make sense" content and not just listed on "Resource Pages" or "Backlinks Pages." I feel like if anything they have become more equal in importance to SEO, links and content, but they are also now in ways interdependent of one another.
ANYWAY, MAY I ASK A QUESTION THAT IS IN NO RELATION TO THE FIRST PART OF THIS COMMENT/QUESTION? WELL I'M GOING TO, HOPE IT IS COOL, SORRY IF IT IS NOT:
Why does the Moz Open Site Explorer tell me that my domain name, AustinsDomain.com is "spammy?" If I buy Moz Pro will this outline the specifics behind this claim? Because no other software, including Google's Search Console, tell me anything of the sort for the domain name in question.
Hi there Austin,
Thanks for the comment and the insight! As for your question at the bottom, I'd encourage you to email [email protected]. We've got a team of Helpsters that can explain what the Moz tools might be able to do to help you out and answer any other questions you might have. :) Hope that helps!
Thanks Peter for writing and sharing this post and I am glad that you're deeply concerned with us- the Moz community. I've followed Moz blog's for a long time but, I a'm happy to be a member. Thanks a lot.
Hapyy to join moz
I just wanted to say a big thank you to all the humans behind Moz: today, the future, the community... You're all greatly appreciated :)
Thanks for the post Pete. Good to see Moz still has a solid plan in place and there is transparency with what is going on. As Wil stated above, laying people off is never easy and, from an outsiders perspective anyway, Moz is handling things the right way. I wouldn't expect anything less. Good luck in the future.
Thanks for the honest post and the personal touch to it. Very much appreciated as a Moz and community user.
Personally I have never written in YouMoz but I have read many of your articles. I think it's a good section of this website. I hope that changes better.
I am very to join your Moz Community. Thanks!
Thanks for the updates, Pete. I'll always be a part of the Moz community since it gives so much back. Thankful to have this in my career as many occupations don't.
Looking forward to what's next for Moz, in particular the changes to YouMoz. Always grateful for Moz's transparency.
Best of luck to all!
All the very best! I will always look forward to see the best of Moz.
Hi Peter, thanks for the post
I like the way you think and how you explain your ideas seriously hopefully always be so many gacias for giving this content
I've not been engaged with Moz community since 1 month ago. It's good to hear that the community will keep moving forward despite the challenges.
Looking forward to see the future of Moz.
Wow such a lot of changes taking place. I'm glad there will be a continued focus on the community. For me that's an essential part of Moz.
Thanks Peter.
Do you think the decision to cut staff from the content team stems from the belief that links are so critically important in SEO?
You can produce all the content in the world but at the end of the day, links are still king.
No, not at all. Sorry, to be clear - Moz has not cut our Content/Audience team. We lost one person on that team, but many teams lost people. We're still big believers in content marketing. We're dropping our content product offering. This is mainly because our efforts were spread too thinly and there was less crossover with our core customer base and the content product than we original hope. I think it's a good product and similar products will be important in the future, but our many-product approach was becoming a costly distraction.
I am Glad being the member of Moz community
hope will be more
I am Glad being the member of Moz community
Thanks :)