I think this is a bad move. Like it or not, I know what SEOmoz is immediately. I've known what it was for years. It's a brand.

Moz makes me think of Mozilla, immediately. That's just how the brain works. It doesn't make say "Oh that must be SEOmoz just expanding their reach!"

Love it or not, we all know what MtGox is. It's a Bitcoin exchange. Even though the name is based on Magic the Gathering, that doesn't matter. If they became Gox, that would be meaningless despite their best intentions.

As always, I'm happy to be corrected by someone who knows more about this stuff than I do, but me thinks this is a bad idea.

It's probably good for their SEO. ;)

Interestingly, the same is true of many consultancies who have also become tired of the expectations and (in my opinion, justified) stereotypes of SEOs as spammers. Many have begun removing "SEO" from their branding messages.

I really don't think anyone is going to confuse Moz and Mozilla. Would you? Outside the tech community, most people only know "Firefox" anyway. Those who are even vaguely familiar with either brand will immediately see the difference.

That said, and to my knowlege, Moz has never been a colloquial term for Mozilla. So probably no need to worry.

This transition from solely focusing on SEO to a more holistic marketing tool is not new. They've been moving in this direction for at least the past year. I think this is a good time for them to make the break from being pigeonholed as an SEO company to something bigger, something more inclusive. SEO is no longer a narrow niche type of marketing, at least not to the people who perform SEO daily or on a professional level.

It's a combination of content creation, site optimization, outreach and relationship building, branding and more. Not all these components are always associated with "SEO", which often times has a negative connotation attached to it. Moz is hoping to capture a larger part of the inbound marketing market than SEOmoz ever could.

Hopefully not.

But the company is probably aware of this brand confusion and still thought it was a good idea.

The name moz ("m-ah-z") makes me think of SEOmoz. The name moz ("m-oe-z") makes me think of Mozilla or Dwight's crazy brother from The Office. Moz is simple, short and recognizable to those in the SEO industry. I don't think they'll have too much trouble getting people to recognize the new brand.

By the way, the old domain was SEOmoz.org which isn't a great domain name for a commercial product. I never understood why they didn't loose the .org since they owned the .com.

The same reason Square redirects square.com to squareup.com. It's SEO suicide to switch domains. They must have thought this was really important.

They realize that SEO has limited revenue potential and probably already maxed it out. If they pivot themselves to create tools for marketing then they can magically double or triple their revenue. In order to do that, they have to ditch the geeky and, sometimes slightly slimy, "SEO" prefix.

Companies will pay big bucks for tools related to marketing whether they are worth it or not.

Albeit, I would of thought most marketers should know what SEO is. But still, I think this will help them sell their product to a more mainstream audience.

It's also interesting that SEOMoz filed for the Moz trademark back in August 2011, so this has been under consideration for a while and it's already been published for review and is live. So if it this bothers the Mozilla folks, at this point it may be difficult for them to contest (IANAL).

But maybe we (You & I) just aren't in their target audience and while it does not seem a good idea to us, it is an insanely awesome idea for their market? Who knows...

Sorry, couldn't resist. :)

I'm not sure that the association is unfair. There are a lot of honest people out there plying the trade and doing good work in the SEO space, but the same could be said for email marketing. For every good guy, there's enough spammers out there that even now, guys like patio11 have to spend a decent amount of time spelling out the difference between legitimate email marketing and spamming. SEO strikes me the same way: lots of people doing good work and being drowned out by the negative press of snake oil salesmen, con men and link sellers.

It's unfair to the people doing the good work... but I don't think it's unfair that people free associate "email marketer" with "spammer" and "SEO Guy" with "Hucksters, Liars and Criminals". Too many run-ins with the Black Hat SEO crowd have made me wary and I'd be shocked if I was the only one.

I'd add that SEO is an easy target because it is (or has been until its very recent transformation into content marketing + nice clean usable sites) blatantly a zero-sum game, whereas most marketing is not inherently zero-sum.

There's uncertainty about what SEO is right now which makes the scammers even harder to spot. Many people using harmful practices (harmful to users as well as the company they're working for) genuinely believe that they are helping.

Black Hat SEO is hilarious. Oh, it works. It works very well, and definitely at least as long as it takes for the SEO to collect their check & a recommendation for the next job.

Interesting that this update comes in the wake of Penguin 2.0, incidentally - could Moz have fallen victim?

1) You can look at their links yourself, if you have any clue how Penguin works, and see that it's not even close to spammy enough to get hit by any Penguin algorithm.

2) Their rankings for key terms remained solid after Penguin. [1] The very definition of a Google penalty includes drops in rankings.

3) In this case the Penguin penalty would transfer across with the 301 redirects they've put in place.

[1] http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research?acc=12245&url...

Most of the SEO companies out there are still either link spammers or impotent content marketers. There are exceptions: SEO-centered companies doing legitimate digital marketing - but it's fairly rare for them to do it well.

I use Moz's Open Site Explorer, and I watch closely to see what SEO companies are doing. More often than not, they're spamming links all across the web. This is true even today, even with Google's spam-fighting techniques becoming increasingly sophisticated. SEO companies are often leading their clients to the slaughter. Some companies that preach "great content, great UX" also turn around and buy or blast links.

To Moz's credit, they've really been pushing hard to encourage people to stop spamming and buying links. Their writers constantly argue against link spam, encouraging SEOs to instead create content that people will love. Their message actually meshes quite well with PG's philosophy on start ups, and indeed I know Rand is influenced by PG and HN.

It's possible that someone deeply involved in the Moz community, as Rand is, may just see a non-representative sample of non-spammers. They must realize this to some extent, as they're pulling "SEO" out of their branding.

As you say, that is unfair to the people doing good work, but also completely… fair… for me to make that association

I think it's a great move for them and will help to win a more skeptical crowd. Although, I still don't trust them with or without "SEO" :)

The post itself mentions some of their services (and acquisitions such as FollowerWonk) which shows the company are not really just an SEO software company although, the bigger point around it goes back to them being beyond SEO as the content they have always focused on themselves alongside the tools they have provided were/are more than just your standard SEO tools.

Personally, I think it’s a smart move for them and the new branding allows them to tackle a much bigger market too!

And then once everyone gets on this bandwagon and the market gets saturated, we'll switch back over to interruption marketing.

I'm a firm believer in the power of inbound marketing, but for all of those things painted in blue[1] there's always a campaign in red to drive my attention to it. True inbound marketing is way too risky at scale.

The next decade and the next century is going to be the ultimate battle for people's attention.

[1] - http://d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/goodbye-seomoz-hello-mo...

In what way is it risky? I can see it being too much work for some people/companies who do mediocre work to begin with. But I can't see what risks are inherent in establishing yourself (or your company) as a thought leader in your field.

See my point about the fact that for every inbound marketing campaign there is always an equal interruption marketing plan assigned to it. Want to write blogs every week? Great! But you need to spam it through distribution channels (twitter, facebbok, email campaigns, PPC, etc)

Long-term, I think inbound marketing is way less risky for one simple reason: We're living in an age of increasing choice and increasing transparency. As buysers/consumers, we're naturally going to lean increasingly towards companies that deliver a better product/experience -- not towards those that happen to place more frequent ads. Those that build their brand by delighting customers (all the way through the process from marketing to sales to service) will find that their investments create greater returns.

But, as I said, I'm biased (but that doesn't necessarily make me wrong).

I might have joined for the SEO, but am most definitely staying for the marketing. I wish Rand and team the greatest success with Moz.

[1] - http://www.mandalorian.com/

Moz (SEOmoz) has the following trademark: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4808:tp...

You can search the site for yourself. Aside from tires (for which there is no "likelihood of confusion") there are no other Moz trademarks. If Mozilla wanted to brand themselves as something other than their company name, they should have picked up the Trademark and used it in official commerce.

I seriously doubt Mozilla has a problem with it anyway. I really don't think it's that confusing.