Moz

Moz is the Seattle SEO software company that began in 2004 as Rand Fishkin's SEOmoz blog and became the industry's schoolhouse: the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Whiteboard Friday videos, the MozCon conference, and tools (Pro, Local, the Links API) built around its proprietary Domain Authority and Page Authority metrics. Ziff Davis acquired it in 2021; Fishkin had left in 2018 to found SparkToro.

Its educational legacy is the moat — more practitioners learned SEO from Moz's free guides than from any other source, and Domain Authority became the industry's default link-equity shorthand (often confused, to Moz's own frustration, for a Google metric). The transparency culture Fishkin set — public metrics, honest posts, even his warts-and-all startup memoir Lost and Founder — shaped how the whole industry communicates.

Use the guides for onboarding juniors (still among the cleanest fundamentals), DA for quick comparative judgments (never absolutes — it's a third-party model), and Whiteboard Friday's archive for concept explanations. For raw index size and link freshness, practitioners now usually pair or replace it with Ahrefs/Semrush data.

Born as the SEOmoz blog in 2004 — Rand Fishkin documenting SEO consulting with his mother Gillian Muessig's firm — it raised venture capital, dropped the 'SEO' from the name in 2013 to chase broader marketing software (a pivot Fishkin's memoir calls his costliest mistake), refocused on SEO, and sold to Ziff Davis in 2021.

Etymology: source.

Search interest for this term over the last five years:

View interest-over-time on Google Trends →

Areas of marketing where moz is a core concern: