I’ve indulged these buggers for long enough: over the last few weeks, I began going to the web hosts of the disinformation writers. Hostinger has been excellent, giving the writers three days to prove what they wrote is genuine, and, of course, 100 per cent of them fail. A UK host called 20i has just informed me they are doing the same. Hetzner, which I know first-hand is an excellent firm, sends an autoresponse, and I know they are on the case. I won’t say who the worst ones are, lest that gives the sploggers some hiding places.
Medium has been excellent dealing with disinformation on its platform, and after a slow start, Quora has done its job, too. Linkedin is, as I have said, expressly fine with disinformation, but who trusts Microsoft these days anyway?
In almost all the cases I report, I advise the websites first, being the polite thing to do. I have my code. In virtually all cases, this is ignored, and in some notable cases, they even double-down by writing more (starlink.care is one; Bit Code Solution is another, on multiple platforms). There’s a sheer dishonesty out there by these people, many of whom claim to be specialists in technology or SEO. As I did with Nexorank, I’m calling out your unscrupulousness.
Looking back to January, when Google Search Console advised me of a suspicious amount of searches for google seo jackyan, it is clear, with hindsight, that bots were doing them, and whomever operates those bots must have then sold this fake “search data” to Semrush. (Semrush was the tool that the more ethical players, who upon realizing their mistake after I told them, came clean and informed me that they were “inspired” to write their disinformation pieces due to what that program showed them in their Keyword Magic Tool.)
I advised Semrush in March what I suspected was happening, and that was ignored—pretty perilous for an NYSE-listed company, given that the right thing would have been to investigate and potentially cut off a supplier that was selling botched data that it was passing on to its customers (from a claimed 10 million user base). Even if that wasn’t the case, an investigation would have helped reveal more, and prevented the many hours I’ve wasted on this, not to mention the abuse I received when one of their own customers posted their drivel to Reddit.
Wouldn’t you want to know if your data sets were tainted?
In the age of “AI” and Boeing using the 737 to ape the de Havilland Comet, maybe US firms do not. I believe the aim of folks like this being listed on the NYSE is to swindle and get rich before they get found out.
As with the Facebook malware case of 2016, the tech press was disinterested, including the two biggest search engine news publications online who I gave well written releases to—you’d think a tool that was reasonably well known in their line of work allegedly selling botched data would be news. To those who don’t follow this blog, that case took two years to put right—when I finally found a female Wired journalist who blew the lid wide open on Facebook’s scheme, after which Facebook stopped forcing questionable programs on to users’ computers.
This time, if I’m right, then there’s a dodgy data broker selling botched data to Semrush, who is complicit in not doing anything about it, and despite having a great story dangled in front of them, the biggest players in the search engine press are also complicit in not doing anything about it. Google, who hosts Semrush, was advised of its customer’s potential role in spurring disinformation that in turn plagues its search engine, but it is also complicit in not doing anything about it. (In Google’s case, they like having junk fill up their results: it’s good for the share price.)
So who can blame me for using my precious time to protect my reputation and, as of today, contacted all the hosts of the sites in Google for the Google SEO jackyan search who wrote disinformation, and who appear on the first three search engine result pages (SERPs, an acronym I learned through a Google forum “expert” gaslighting me back in 2009) in Google?
I run an SME, so unlike someone who is actually famous, who is used to having drivel written about them in the tabloid press, I can’t afford hundreds of posts that link me to the murky world of SEO and words I have never said. The celebrity has thousands, maybe millions, of accurate articles to counter the BS. For me, disinformation forms a larger percentage of the content about me online.
So here’s to seeing the tail end of more of the disinformation as I then move to the next three SERPs in Google. You folks were warned.
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