---
title: Moz — what it is | RGM® Glossary
url: https://realgrowthmatters.com/glossary/moz/
updated: 2026-06-10
source_html: https://realgrowthmatters.com/glossary/moz/
---

# Moz

proper noun

Half the working SEOs alive learned the craft from its free guides — the software almost came second.

Founded
:   2004 (as SEOmoz), Seattle

Founder
:   Rand Fishkin (with Gillian Muessig)

Famous for
:   Domain Authority, Whiteboard Friday

Owner
:   Ziff Davis (since 2021)

## Forms & parts of speech

DA · acronym (its metric)

Moz's 0-100 Domain Authority.

"A **DA** 70 referring domain — Moz's score, not Google's, but a useful proxy."

## What it is

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.

## Why marketers rely on it

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.

## How to use it well

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.

**Worked example.** A marketing manager inherits an SEO-naive content team. The Moz onboarding: everyone reads the Beginner's Guide week one, watches five foundational Whiteboard Fridays week two, then audits their own pages against what they learned. The shared vocabulary alone — crawl, index, authority, intent — cuts meeting confusion in half, and the team stops writing content that can't rank before the consultant's first invoice arrives.

**Failure modes to watch.** Quoting DA as if Google computes it; treating decade-old Whiteboard Fridays as current algorithm truth; and buying tools before the free education that makes them usable.

## Synonyms & antonyms

### Synonyms

MozSEOmoz (original name)

## Origin & history

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](https://moz.com/about).

## Usage trends

Search interest for this term over the last five years:

[View interest-over-time on Google Trends →](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=moz%20seo&date=today%205-y)

## Common questions

What is Moz?
:   The SEO software and education company founded by Rand Fishkin in 2004 — creator of Domain Authority and Whiteboard Friday.

What is Domain Authority?
:   Moz's proprietary 0-100 score predicting a domain's ranking strength from its link profile — an industry proxy, not a Google metric.

Who owns Moz now?
:   Ziff Davis, which acquired it in 2021. Founder Rand Fishkin left in 2018 to start SparkToro.

## Related tools & calculators

- tool[Experiment planner](/tools/experiment-planner/)
- tool[Funnel drop-off analyzer](/tools/funnel-drop-off-analyzer/)

## Resources & people to follow

- referenceMoz.com — guides + tools
- referenceWhiteboard Friday — the video archive
- book*Lost and Founder* — Rand Fishkin

Curated, non-competitor resources verified per term.

## Related training

- module[Content marketing](/training/content-marketing/)

## Disciplines

Areas of marketing where moz is a core concern:

[Content strategy](/training/content-marketing/)[SEO](/training/growth-marketing-foundations/)

## Read next

## Related terms

[Rand Fishkin](/glossary/rand-fishkin/)[SEO](/glossary/seo/)[Link building](/glossary/link-building/)[Backlink](/glossary/backlink/)[Ahrefs](/glossary/ahrefs/)

## Sources

1. trends[Google Trends — "moz seo"](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=moz%20seo&date=today%205-y)