PS., September 18, 1000 UTC: Semrush has reached out to me privately and seems willing to look into things. I won’t divulge private messages but this could be the breakthrough I had hoped for.
Semrush has responded on Reddit to what I posted yesterday: it helps to have a public forum, though not before two users downvoted my post. Semrush users are a sensitive bunch who don’t like it when their program is called out.
Here’s what Vic from their team wrote.
Hi Jack,
Semrush doesn’t generate or create search terms; we provide estimations of search volume based on data from various sources.These keywords reflect what people have been searching for on the internet.
You can find more on where Semrush data comes from here: https://social.semrush.com/3AeIGCe
Even if it were possible for us to remove a keyword, it wouldn’t eliminate its presence online or prevent others from using it.
We’re not directly using your name but showing trends based on the keywords that appear in search data.
We understand that inaccurate or misleading information can be frustrating.
We’d recommend reaching out to the website owners to have any misinformation taken down. – Vic
In other words, Vic didn’t read a word I wrote and is trying to ’splain their way out of it.
But that’s these big tech companies for you: blame the user and give them useless advice, something that they have already discredited.
Oh well, junior, that needs something stronger.
Hi Vic, thank you, but I’m afraid this doesn’t really address the issue.
I did a lot of research on Semrush before I posted here and what you’ve pointed me to suggests two things that I already knew: (a) you rely on third parties to provide you with search data (which I stated above); and (b) there is some automation on your end.
The fact is my name, or at least an unspaced version of it, has wound up in there, and there is no reasonable way—after analysing the trends to my own site for 21 years, and to my company’s site for 29—that the combinations including my name that are in the Keyword Magic Tool are being searched for. No one with this name, spaced or unspaced, has any connection with Google and SEO.
Assuming Semrush is innocent (and note above that I do say you are when it comes to the search terms), then you have a highly questionable third party that has injected an unspaced version of my name into your service. It would have been prudent, I thought, to identify who that third party is.
What I had observed at the start of the year were bot searches with the combinations that wound up in the Keyword Magic Tool, and my theory is that whomever is selling these data to you generated the searches themselves. Unless you can come up with another explanation, this is the most plausible one.
Your recommendation of reaching out to the website owners is, again as I mentioned, something I have been doing.
But put yourself in my shoes and please have at least some empathy: since Semrush began telling its users that my name, and Google and SEO, were being searched for, at least one post per day for nine months has gone up with disinformation. How much time do you think has gone in to reaching out to every one of those website owners?
And do they do anything? Only a tiny handful came clean and pointed the blame at you. An even smaller handful sent me their Keyword Magic Tool screenshots to show me how they had been hoodwinked.
The rest ignore it, and go on harming an innocent party’s reputation.
In the last month I’ve begun turning to web hosts because your recommendation is over 95 per cent ineffective.
Happily, a few companies have come on board because they understand their AUPs are being breached. Medium has removed every item from your users that they posted to its website—they have done this for months, since they were among the early victims of having their service used for keyword-stuffing. Quora, too. In the last month, Hostinger, Hetzner, Google, WordPress, and others have either had those pages removed, or nuked the disinformation accounts and domains. It’s slow-going as I have to research the TOSs and AUPs of each web host to see if their customer has breached them.
Finally, I’ve had some positive results—though I suspect your users won’t be happy to learn that they lost their websites.
Sure, it’s not Semrush’s fault that some of these users are liars, and they deserved what was coming to them. But I think one of your third parties is selling you botched data, and I thought it would be in your best interests—and mine—to find out who it is. You’d be saving yourselves some money, and stopping this sort of harm.
Allowing it to continue would be seen as negligent—especially under the laws of your country.
Finally, of course removal of my name from Semrush doesn’t mean removal online—but prior to its appearance in your database, there were no massive disinformation epidemics like what I have witnessed for virtually all of 2024.
That’s right: if you’re a Semrush user who posts crap about me, your website will be taken down. But go on, carry on using their program.
And this is just little ol’ me: what happens when Semrush’s third-party data provider manages to include a big company’s name in there? Will they be as reasonable and level-headed? In their country, armed with lawyers, I don’t think so.
I emailed them in March to no avail, but you could say they have known this for six months. And now there is a public record of their knowledge of this issue for all to see. We can all see that they’d rather not lift a finger and allow allegedly botched data to be propagated to its users. The greater damage that can and will result from their inaction qualifies very much as negligence.
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