With the hundreds of disinformation posts about me out there, I began contacting hosts. Medium, I’ve noted elsewhere, has been great. Quora has also removed disinformation. Hostinger gives its clients three days to prove their side of the story, after which the page gets nuked since so far, none of their clients have been able to show that what they wrote is true. Linkedin has been the worst, as they have told me they see nothing wrong with disinformation.
I’ve been told by a number of these posters that they relied on Semrush to see what keywords are trending, and they keyword-stuffed to suit. I advised Semrush in March that these keywords could not possibly be trending, and that it must be getting dodgy data from one of its contractors. I never received a response, even though it would have been in everyone’s interests for Semrush to look into this. Semrush might be able to save some money by identifying who has been feeding it dodgy data. For a publicly listed company, I thought they would care more about their share price. You don’t want this to be the one tiny thing that sends the whole enterprise crashing down.
Tonight, I decided to go to Semrush’s hosts, Google, Inc. I don’t know which part of Google hosts them, but according to who-hosts-this.com, the big G is indeed Semrush’s hosting provider. There is an irony here: Google enabling a company to tell its users about potentially wrong keywords, and those users then use LLMs to generate BS that keyword-stuff Google, thereby rendering Google even more useless.
I wrote, on its cloud abuse reporting form (the closest Google would find that might suit this purpose), the below.
This has been ongoing since the start of 2024. Your client Semrush (semrush.com) has been telling people that my name, along with some other words, is trending. I believe this to be false as these keyword combinations are unlikely (or are bot-generated). I advised Semrush of this in March. I have screenshots from Semrush users detailing this.
I understand Semrush sources its search data from partners. It would have been in Semrush’s interests to identify which one was providing false or questionable data. Yet the company has ignored my notification and continues to tell its users that these keywords are trending.
The result is that there is daily disinformation about me being posted, with the keyword-stuffing affecting Google. I spend hours each day advising these users or having their pages removed. Semrush really needs to act. It’s been seven months, every day, of my having to do this to preserve my reputation.
I do not have logs but I do have screenshots (attached below).
Google only allows a single file, so I’ve provided this latest one, which was furnished to me by a kind Semrush user a few days ago.
Google hasn’t been great at acknowledging any Gmail spam reports, though I noted tonight it did send auto-responses for spam result reports. At the time of writing, there was no response to the above.
We’ll see what happens but I haven’t exaggerated about the daily disinformation. I don’t quite check every night but, say, every third night I take a look and I’ll find three more posts.
Can we finally cut this BS off at source? I have my doubts, but it’s worth a shot.