Hello, I'm the author of the Moz piece and just wanted to respond. (No, I do not work for them -- I'm just a contributor.)
1. They do not sell marketing services. They sell marketing software.
2. I pitched my article to them, and they were very skeptical about the topic at first. Obviously, the issue can come across as very conspiratorial and sensational. But once I showed them all of my credible sources and citations and explained everything in-depth, they decided to publish the piece.
3. Again, I cannot speak for Moz, but my sense is that they will publish anything that they perceive to be very helpful and interesting for their audience -- digital marketers. They more that they do so, the more that their brand will grow among their audience and the more that people will visit the website to read the good articles.
I'm the author -- and I'm completely amazed. Thanks to whoever submitted this, and thanks to all the upvoters! I'll be going through the comments and responding when necessary. Feel free to AMA!
Oh, there seem to be a lot of interesting stories here from people who worked for ad companies and related firms. Feel free to post your comments on the original Moz article -- I'm sure the community there would love to hear about it.
Hello! I'm the author. I just needed to use "alleged" a lot because I was citing second-hand -- though credible -- information and did not do any independent research. I could not verify anything myself, so I needed to make sure that the point was clear.
Hello! I didn't quite understand -- are looking for a log analysis tool that also helps with related web analytics? Disclosure: I work for Logz.io (http://logz.io) and our log analytics platform can do exactly that.
To learn more about the intersection of log analytics and web analytics, you might want to see this Moz post I wrote a few weeks ago on using log data to analyze search engine crawl rates, crawl budgets, bad response codes, crawl priorities, duplicate URL crawling, and more:
1. They do not sell marketing services. They sell marketing software.
2. I pitched my article to them, and they were very skeptical about the topic at first. Obviously, the issue can come across as very conspiratorial and sensational. But once I showed them all of my credible sources and citations and explained everything in-depth, they decided to publish the piece.
3. Again, I cannot speak for Moz, but my sense is that they will publish anything that they perceive to be very helpful and interesting for their audience -- digital marketers. They more that they do so, the more that their brand will grow among their audience and the more that people will visit the website to read the good articles.