When you have been on this disinformation-busting journey for nine months, you can work out how Semrush got everything so wrong.
Here’s one item, a bunch of SEO tools, and if you read the description, ‘Google SEO Xiaoyan’ is in the copy.
Probably deeply questionable, which is why Google offers it for Chrome.
Here’s the next item, my (very talented) namesake in Shanghai, and he has Xiaoyan in his URL.
I’d say Semrush began “predicting” based on these two items. Since there are SEO tools called Xiaoyan, and there’s a person with this name who also goes by Jack Yan, pretty soon it was coughing up Google SEO jackyan, including words like tools and updates, and propagating them in its Keyword Magic Tool. By its own admission, it totally overestimated the number.
Add an audience hungry for SEO rubbish—its principal customer base—and it was a potent mixture that basically blew up with me and anyone with my name as the victims.
As I maintained from day one, there is no way on God’s green earth that anyone would really be searching for these combinations. Semrush claimed that a keyword was trending but never elaborated which. If it was jackyan, then I say there is still a possibility there was bot activity involved. The volume would never have been that high.
Semrush admitted their software made a bad prediction, and we can see from the above just how it linked certain concepts together.
Is it anomalous? I don’t know, and I have no interest in finding out. I do know that there’s no way I would trust Semrush’s programming, though based on the last nine months, there are plenty of people who will worship its results unquestioningly. That is even more deeply concerning. Humans turned into automatons in cyberspace, doing whatever a program tells them—sort of like cyber men.
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