• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 18, 2016

In a surprising twist of events, Seattle-based Moz, a 12-year-old maker of marketing software, will cut 28% of its workforce as part of an initiative to refocus on search engine optimization (SEO).

Those services will range from rank tracking and keyword research to local listings, duplicate management, on-page services, crawl and links.

As part of the realignment, Moz will no longer invest in its Followerwonk or Moz Content products, Moz CEO Sarah Bird wrote in a blog post.

"We will find a graceful way to sunset Moz Content," she wrote, and the company is looking for "a good home for Followerwonk," which means it will try to sell off the assets.

Moz went through several major changes in the past few years. Moz changed its name from SEOMoz in 2013, and then on Jan. 15, 2014, Rand Fishkin, Moz founder, wrote his final post as CEO and handed the reins to Sarah Bird. Overall, the company has raised a little more than $29 million in venture capital funding.

Before refocusing its efforts on core SEO services, Moz had about 220 employees and contractors supporting Moz clients.

"As you can imagine, this is an emotional time for us internally," Bird wrote. "Hug a Mozzer near you because we need it this week. We’re so grateful for this community’s support and look forward to making SEO software you truly love."

With an outpouring of support from around the globe, many of those who took the time to comment on the post showed concern for the community's future. The Moz community provides a forum from which marketing practitioners can bounce ideas off one another. 

Concern came from Mike Gracia, a digital strategist at Thinkable based in the United Kingdom, focused on how people appreciate Moz as a community.

Gianluca Fiorelli, SEO and Web marketing consultant at ILoveSEO.net in Valencia, Spain, called Moz the "most amazing, relevant and influential community in the search industry." He expressed his joy around Moz refocusing on what made the company great, but said he is "worried" about the future of the community, not just its tools.

"Yeah this is a big concern for me," wrote Alan Bleiweiss, Forensic SEO audit and consulting specialist, at Alan Bleiweiss Consulting in Folsom, Calif. "Even though I have not had the energy or capacity to participate in the community in a while, it's such an integral part of the Moz eco-system, that in many ways, the community IS the heart-beat that drives everything else for many people."