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Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

I'm not an active user or part of the SEOmoz/moz community, so perhaps my perspective is off (or perhaps it's better) but...

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.

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Even when it was SEOmoz the first thing I always thought of was Mozilla. And I haven't even used a Mozilla browser in years.

Well, at some bitcoin related forums informal 'Gox' is actually used quite a lot to refer to MtGox. Regarding SEOmoz to Moz change, I'm more concerned that people may start to somehow see Moz as being associated with Mozilla Corporation. The idea behind rebranding (to distance from 'pure SEO', so to speak) is valid, but the choice of the new name seems unfortunate to me.

> people may start to somehow see Moz as being associated with Mozilla

It's probably good for their SEO. ;)

The differentiation between what Moz does and what SEOs do is both real and useful. Moz hasn't fit into the paradigm of "SEO" for a while, so it's best they don't call themselves an SEO tool company anymore.

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.

While it may be clutching at straws, Mozilla do actually use 'Moz' for vendor prefixing in Firefox. While purely technical (and only applicable to CSS), there may on some small occasion be a need for disambiguation.

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

I can't manipulate the way you process the terms "Moz" and it's association. The "Moz" = "Mozilla" comparison is easy to make so I hope time and continuing branding efforts by Moz will hopefully change that.

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.

> The "Moz" = "Mozilla" comparison is easy to make so I hope time and continuing branding efforts by Moz will hopefully change that.

Hopefully not.

> I can't manipulate the way you process the terms "Moz" and it's association.

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

I would argue a name change at the point of a pivot or significant redesign is a great time to refresh the brand identity as well. The internet marketing industry is changing rapidly right now in light of Google Panda/Penguin and the massive growth we're seeing in mobile. Lots of SEO companies are changing their software offerings to fit the evolving needs of marketers.

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.

"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.

I have this aliased pretty strongly in my head from years of typing '-moz' in front of experimentally supported CSS features.

This is a very lukewarm rebranding. It sounds like the kind of thing that is a preface to a second rebranding in the future. Better to do the whole rebranding now, or leave it alone. But a very difficult decision to make internally to the company losing its old name.

They are not going to have much of a problem. People who knew SEOmoz will recognize Moz. Besides they are a strong SEO company. They will own many of the Moz related keywords soon enough.

For me personally, the only reason I know what MtGox is, is that I've heard it enough times in relation to Bitcoins that I've made the connection. I don't know anything about bitcoins and I don't know anything about the root of it's name. "Moz" will be fine in the same way that "MtGox" is fine. They put out a lot of content and each time it will reference and reinforce the name. I think dumping "SEO" from the name is a fine move on their part.

I also think it is a bad move for the end user. But likely a great move for Moz.

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.

The thing is, most marketing types who actually pay for this software don't think like this. As mentioned in the article, a lot of people actually had troubled pronouncing the brand as they didn't realise it was an acronym.

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.

I agree about the Mozilla connection.

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).

I am not saying, that your perspective is wrong - I certainly feel that you have made a good point there.

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...

It'll be interesting to see which company Google's autocomplete ends up suggesting when someone types "Moz".. right now it's Mozilla, but with SEOmoz's abilities I wonder if that'll change.

It's just how the brain works. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKKa_OlSXgQ

Sorry, couldn't resist. :)

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