Call me an idealist, but I think people should stop using those search engine copy massaging programs, write like real humans, and expect the technology to bend to us, rather than the other way round.
That’s how we still conduct business.
There are still disinformation pages about me out there, but no new ones since I called Semrush out on their subreddit. Of the remainder, many are being taken down by their hosts. I’m still commenting on and writing to a few, as it seems gentlemanly to give them an ‘En garde’, pointing out that Semrush has come out publicly to say that the keywords (which included an unspaced version of my name) were never trending to begin with.
You’d think that even the least ethical among them—those who decided they would continue to harm an innocent party’s reputation for the sake of prostituting themselves to Google—would care about their own standing, namely not to look stupid having posted copy based on, in this case, a computer bug.
It says volumes about certain (most) people in the “SEO” industry that they actually would opt to look stupid.
Earlier tonight, I altered the copy on Autocade’s ‘About’ page which mentioned that the site had netted a million page views in 40 days, which was true when that was written. We know that it’s between 60 and 90 presently. It would be disingenuous to continue making the more impressive claim.
More so since recent checks—caused by the Semrush saga—revealed that not only were Semrush bots hitting the site, so were Bytedance and ChatGPT ones, likely inflating the number. With many of them blocked, most recent daily page view increases are in the 13,000–15,000 region. Still healthy, but not in that million-per-40-days zone.
That also explained why Libriz recorded a substantial amount of traffic from Singapore and China. We now know those hits were Bytedance ones, browsing the site even before Google indexed it. I imagine it must have found us through Yandex, which tends to be faster than Google at picking up new sites. It’s not hard to imagine a Chinese company harvesting based on results from a Russian search engine.
Given the commentary above, I am certainly more of an expert on SEO than the people who wrote falsehoods about me being an expert on SEO. Google still records 118 results (actually higher: Google doesn’t spider everything) for Google SEO jackyan. I’ll be happier when it updates and removes at least a dozen sites that various hosts have taken down.