Posting on Reddit has elicited something from Semrush, with Vic on their team writing this in response to me.
Hi Jack, sorry for any confusion—I’ve been discussing the case with my team internally to make sure we’re all on the same page.
Our system aims to predict trends using various signals, but sometimes unexpected patterns can emerge.
We believe there was an analytical error, not any intentional act by a third party.
As you noticed, the keyword spiked in 2023, which led it to appear in our tool.
We first noticed the keyword before December 2023 because some signals showed a volume of over 2,000 searches, which affected the trend in our tool, leading to an overestimation of the actual volume.
Thanks for your patience and for bringing it to our attention—we’ll work with it to improve our data and calculations. – Vic
I’m no SEO expert (despite what the disinformation sploggers say ad nauseam—though I venture to say I know more than they do) but I take this to mean that Semrush’s third-party providers gave them some legitimate data from which they extrapolated wrongly, leading to my unspaced name appearing in the system.
The December 2023 date I gave to Vic in private messaging, as the month when I started seeing bot searches here to this blog. It seems that earlier keyword (I wonder if it was xiaoyan, which appears in a lot of splogs) might have been searched for—but once again I am at a loss on why, and I doubt Semrush will tell me.
So we can pin some of the blame on Semrush, but they have finally tried to find out what was happening. Kind of lets them off the hook as far as dodgy third parties go—we now know that theory to be disproved. But sadly, it doesn’t let their algorithms off the hook, though cleverly Vic has promised improvements, which will placate their users and shareholders, and save their arses to some degree. For me, after going through nine months of this, Semrush won’t be a program I would ever consult—not that I would because, once again for the cheap seats at the back, I don’t work in SEO.
Ultimately it’s the lying SEO-gaming sploggers who are at fault, since no one asked them to deceive. They did it by choice. I don’t narc on anyone who used Semrush and told the truth, since they weren’t there to harm a total stranger’s reputation.
My reply to Vic:
Hi Vic, thank you, so glad to have some progress here!
I think I know the pattern that led to this (based on some of the sploggers that I saw and what they posted before their article about me—it was a large sample, after all).
I’m guessing those searches weren’t about ‘jackyan’ but the pattern was mistakenly extrapolated from those signals, and then wound up in the tool?
I appreciate your transparency here. Hopefully the improvements will see ‘jackyan’ soon exit the Keyword Magic Tool, though I realize you can’t comment on this. I’m continuing with the host-level take-downs of these pages, and maybe with Semrush’s improvements, we’ll begin to see these disinformation posts cease.
Still over a hundred, maybe hundreds, of sploggers are yet to be dealt to. If the few dozen wins I have had so far are any indication, some will have to delete pages. Others will lose their entire sites. If only those people simply accepted my messages and removed the one page that was at issue. But since they ignored me, and the most arrogant ones ignore their own web hosts, they deserve what’s coming to them.
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