martinibuster - 6:50 pm on Jun 24, 2011 (gmt 0)

What is a moz anyway?

Sgt. Kickaxe probably already knows the background history but there are others who may not know, so this is for their benefit.

Moz is a reference to Mozilla. DMOZ (at the time called NewHoo) allied themselves with Netscape/Mozilla and were available at Directory.Mozilla.org [directory.mozilla.org]. DMoz is a reference to that URL. Directory Mozilla = DMOZ. And that's where Moz comes from.

seoMoz has nothing to do with Mozilla (afaik). I think it was just a popular suffix implying trust so they appended it to SEO. Kind of like how DMOZ was initially named NewHoo (a reference to Yahoo). Yahoo forced NewHoo to ditch the "Hoo" suffix.

Is seoMoz entitled to the MOZ suffix or are they infringing on the Mozilla trademark? That's a legal question I don't have the answer to. There are many non-Mozilla sites using the Moz suffix, seoMoz is not alone.