How very interesting to see that the disinformation posts about me have stopped going up since I called out Semrush on their own subreddit. For four days I’ve not found any new ones on Google.
The timing tells me that Semrush can, contrary to its response, adjust keywords, especially after learning the sheer hell their program has put me through. I’m very grateful that they did.
The second thing this tells me is that had they acted when I first alerted them in March, I could have been spared six months of daily work, hours each day spent defending my reputation against disinformation.
If I were famous this wouldn’t have mattered: there’d be millions of truthful articles about me in the press to counter the fabrications of “SEO” people in (predominantly) south Asia. But as a regular citizen, hundreds of disinformation articles formed a big chunk of what existed about me online.
This whole incident tells me that the rot of US tech companies doesn’t exist only at the top.
It’s just as you go further down, there are more honest people playing in the field. Though that doesn’t mean the field is not muddy with some players luxuriating in the dirty end.
And how gullible is the SEO world?
Or corrupt?
It wasn’t just Semrush who ignored the serious damage being done here. Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal were both sent my release in March. A tool that their own readers find useful was producing an ‘analytical error’ (to use Semrush’s words) that wound up with ‘unexpected patterns’. In other words, it made predictions and was totally wrong, and fed that BS to its users.
Considering this went on all year, then I would say Semrush’s predictions are about as accurate as going to a crystal-ball street corner psychic.
And people pay thousands for this?
If anyone ever thought the SEO world was largely murky and corrupt—as I did—then this whole incident has proven us right.
I would hate to be in it as a honest player—and they do exist—because you’re struggling to stand out from all the noise. What a pity that one of the industry’s most famous tools is questionable.
I did tell Ahrefs, meanwhile. They weren’t particularly interested in using this ammo against their principal competitor.
You do have to wonder why. Are they peddling the same thing?
Their explanation was they would rather compete on the merits of their own offering. I suppose that’s fair enough.
Seeing how certain US firms behave, especially in the tech sector, given that touches us around the world, then if they’re listed on a stock exchange, then odds are they’re crooked. This is the industry that has now given us yet another false prophet, one Sam Altman.
Apparently he’s the head of Open AI and, if you read Ed Zitron’s entry in his newsletter, Silicon Valley has held up a man who has allegedly achieved nothing as its next great white hope.
The industry’s empty promises will lead to tulipomania.
In the meantime, this “AI” nonsense was in no small part responsible for the disinformation about me, as “SEO” people employed it to author their drivel.
The tools the tech sector created will, ironically, render their field useless: search engines spidering rubbish and serving it back out again in a GIGO loop, and Mark Zuckerberg now saying that bots will make up the chatter in your feed. I said Facebook went all in on bots in the 2010s. These trends are exactly what anyone could have predicted as far back as 2017, even further back.
Anyone apart from Semrush, natch.
These tech bros are the last people we should put any faith into.
Right now, the human element has been taken out of so many things, with “AI” some sort of panacea.
If this is all going to work out, then the human element still needs to come first. Human editing, human directories, human inputs.
We need to remember that the technology serves us. When I say ‘us’, I mean regular people whose lives should be made better—not extracted from.
And the whole Semrush incident shows that there are too many people all too willing to serve the algorithm of its Keyword Magic Tool and post content in what can only be described as prostrating themselves at the altar of tech.
They had it so backwards that it isn’t funny.
And now, the shrinking number (thanks to cooperative hosts) who are still talking about Google SEO jackyan or whatever combination they read on Semrush are going to look incredibly gullible, after their own tool’s people have come out to say they got it wrong.
Maybe it is time to keep the likes of Nexorank—one of the biggest liars encountered in this sad episode—online as they are, complete with their deceptions, as reminders of those suppliant to tech and reliant on “AI” at the expense of humanity and originality. We need the exhibits in the freak show to show us the folly of our ways, lest we forget.
You may also like
