One very interesting development in the whole fight against misinformation using my name is that Google won’t give me a right of reply through this blog.
You’d logically think that an authoritative site would appear higher, all things being fair, but my posts about the spammy keywords don’t appear in the results. Misinformation, however, does, and these are all from fairly new sites that have no authority to them—or Google has allowed itself to be gamed in a big way. (In fact, it’s interesting to note that Google appears to be ranking my PHP pages based on how long the titles are, with single-word titles being ranked first. It provides less junk to their licensee, GMX Search. More soon—maybe.)
Scoop is there at least for searches done here in New Zealand, but most of the junk is coming from south Asia.
No such issue over at Bing. At Mojeek, my site appears on the second page, which is disappointing, as they have let the junk sites get the better of them for this query. In some ways I am not surprised given that Mojeek does get influenced by keyword frequency, which makes it fantastic for internal site searches, even ones for the wider web uncovering sites that Big Tech might unfairly bury. But here you wish they could have examined inbound links and authority more.
I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at Google’s DMCA takedown that I initiated against a misinformation video. It was done in hours of the report. This was Medium-level fast.
And props to those who are reporting the truth. Jaweria at Urbanitek has actually continued to investigate this on his site and he provides a screenshot to show what he sees in its Keyword Magic Tool. These data contained within Semrush, as far as I can make out, are BS. However, the total volume has dropped by around 3,000 to 18,830, and the keywords’ combinations have gone from 173 to 12—not enough to prevent daily misinformation from being uploaded though.
He concludes, ‘Many SEO experts, when conducting keyword research, consider high volume and low keyword difficulty for excellent ranking on google. After discovering the real glitch in SEMrush, I realized that relying solely on this tool is not advisable.’
Indeed, I spoke with an old school friend based in Auckland who has access to Semrush, and he says he does not believe its keyword data. Believe it at your own risk.
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