About MOZ.com

MOZ is a software service company established in Seattle, Washington, U.S. They sell marketing analytics and inbound marketing software subscriptions. MOZ was founded in the year 2004 by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig. They started off as a consulting business and moved to SEO software development in the year 2008.

MOZ hosts an online platform which contains over one million digital marketers and marketing related tools across the world. Among the most popular tools by MOZ are link building, site audits, keyword research, and page optimization insights which aid companies to get a better look at their position on the search engines. This also helps them to improve their online search engine ranking.

Later in May 2013, the company launched their new website moz.com and renamed themselves as MOZ. Its value had soared from $1.5 million in 2008 to $11.4 million in 2011 in terms of revenue. MOZ is known for its many valuable and useful tools, such as Moz Keyword Explorer, mozRank, MozPro, Open Site Explorer, and MozBar.

• Moz Keyword Explorer: It is a keyword research tool which gives the user accurate keyword suggestions and SEO competition. It contains SERP( Search Engine Result Pages) features.
• mozRank: One could think of this as a tool along the same lines as Google PageRank. With this tool, one can search for popular search trends.
• MozPro: Another great tool, it helps the user to track rankings, track the competitors, and gives SEO site crawl checkups. It is equipped with the SERP feature tracking as well.
• Open Site Explorer: This SEO tool is completely free and is used to provide link data.
• MozBar: It is an SEO browser tool by MOZ.

A great acquisition by SEOmoz was Followerwonk in 2012 which was an online tool for searching, filtering, and managing Twitter bios along with other management functions in Twitter such as the analytics.

Do I Recommend MOZ Tools?

Not really, no. MOZ ranks for a lot of competitive and profitable keywords, but I don’t think that has anything to do with their SEO “skills.” From what I can tell, MOZ is one of the first blogs that focused all their content around SEO before people really knew what SEO was. So SEOMOZ (or MOZ) was the place to learn and talk about everything SEO which made them an authority on the subject very early on.

MOZ has a lot of authority backlinks because they’re well established and popular. But there’s a huge difference between being on the first page of Google because you’re popular, and being on the first page of Google because you’re good at SEO. Just because you’re a popular singer doesn’t mean you can actually sing.

I’ve watched some of their Youtube videos and their SEO tips are very vague or non applicable. I’ve watched some of their paid videos on Udemy, and it’s also very vague and not useful. I’m not convinced they know how to do SEO the way it needs to be done in 2017.

I challenge them to make a new website in 2017 and rank it on the first page of Google without piggybacking their MOZ brand. Until that happens, thumbs down. Also their SEO tools don’t really work that well…if at all. I plugged a few websites into their SEO site explorer, and it only shows about 20% of your backlinks. Sometimes the tool shows that you have ZERO backlinks. I’ve heard other people make mention of this and show some concern, but hey, “it’s MOZ and they’re the kings” so people keep paying $100/month for their SEO tools that don’t even work. That’s crazy.

If you’re building a website for the first time in 2017, then you need to learn how to rank your website from someone that knows how to rank websites in 2017. MOZ was established in 2004 before all the crazy Google Updates, Sandbox penalties and algorithm changes. They can’t teach you how to rank a website in 2017 because I don’t think they know how. That’s why they sell SEO software instead of SEO Services.

None of what I’m saying is probably true. But if anybody out there is claiming to be good at SEO, I want to see proof on a brand new website. An SEO blog started in 2004 (13 years ago) ranking on the first page of Google for “SEO” has nothing to do with SEO skills, does it? That’s just an authority website and you can’t “SEO” your authority.

My conclusion? MOZ is an authority website when it comes to general information about SEO, but I’m not confident that they could build a new website tomorrow and rank it anywhere in Google. I hope no one from MOZ ever stumbles across this article either. Hahaha 🙂