Since emailing Semrush got nowhere, and sending a release to the search engine press got nowhere, maybe posting to their subreddit might work. Of course, it might get deleted. It might even make things worse and spark copycats. Who knows? But what choice do I have after nine months?
How the Keyword Magic Tool made my year hell
I noticed some bot queries hitting my blog at the start of the year—little did I know these weird searches would wind up with Semrush, a company I had never heard of, yet became the most unwelcome proper noun of 2024.After those weird queries were blog posts trying to link me, all claiming that I worked in Google SEO, or that there was an algorithm, checker, or an SEO suite of tools named after me, or I was a lead developer for Google. All of it was disinformation.
When these writers were confronted, a few came clean. They each told me that there was a high search volume for an unspaced version of my name, plus Google, SEO and a few other terms—the bot searches that were hitting my site months before—in a program they used called Semrush. A few sent me screenshots.
I see that Semrush gets its search data from third-party suppliers (which begs the question of how they each know what we are searching, if they are not Google themselves), so it can consider itself innocent of this. And Semrush can probably have a clean conscience insofar as it never asked any of these hundreds of people to compose disinformation.
The trouble with a 10 million user base is that hundreds still wrote disinformation to fit the keywords, and I’ve spent hours virtually every day this year fighting it.
Some very specifically identify me, and include my real history, even my photo, blending it in with their nonsense.
As I notified Semrush in March about this, I find it disappointing that nothing was done.
Here was a party evidently selling Semrush botched data, or data that had nothing to do with any human agency, and, as far as I can tell, no investigation was done.
Nine months later, these disinformation posts continue to go up.
A small handful have been honest, but only because of my hundreds of hours invested into preserving my reputation—and the resulting efforts making their way into “AI” data sets that these spamdexing, keyword-stuffing blog posters draw from.
I care because a lot of what was written was untrue and damaging. It’s even harmful. When these people posted their drivel to Reddit, understandably users here came to the conclusion that I was behind the keyword-stuffing of my own name, and I began receiving abuse about it.
This is the consequence of Semrush’s third-party supplier and Semrush’s own inaction when I alerted them six months ago. This is pretty bad, I think, for an NYSE-listed company.
Interestingly, the search engine specialist press were keen to cover this up after I received no response from Semrush, and Semrush continued to feature an unspaced version of my name in its Keyword Magic Tool.
I’ve had some success in the last month removing the posts by going to the web hosts, after months of writing to the individuals who posted their drivel. Medium has been very effective in removing these from the start when users posted there. And the few truthful posts that went up have helped turn the tide. Those I don’t touch—I don’t mind people writing honestly.
Still, someone out there owes me big time for the hours spent preserving my reputation—and sadly, I can only see this sort of thing get worse.
I’m not a big celeb who can count on millions of other entries on the internet to tell the truth. I’m a regular person running a small business, and hundreds of disinformation posts form a big percentage of what is out there about me.
I could have just left this and allowed Semrush to continue buying faulty data and seeing who else would get caught in the disinformation trap—but after nine months, it’s time I came to this forum.
Here’s your second notice, Semrush. Since you don’t answer emails, I’ve come here. Will you do anything about it, or will it be ignored?
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