It’s not enough to block just Semrush’s bot, SemrushBot, in one’s robots.txt, since they have a whole bunch of them. We’ve usually allowed all bots but with “AI” and Semrush’s terrible programming that wasted hours of my time every day for nine months, there are certain parties no longer welcome to crawl. To block Semrush […]
Category: business
Business and commerce.
Forgetting humanity: the desperation of tech
How very interesting to see that the disinformation posts about me have stopped going up since I called out Semrush on their own subreddit. For four days I’ve not found any new ones on Google. The timing tells me that Semrush can, contrary to its response, adjust keywords, especially after learning the sheer hell their […]
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Forty-eight hours without new disinformation—dare we hope for seventy-two?
Now isn’t that interesting? After posting about Semrush on their Reddit, where their error is laid bare for all to see, I have now had a blissful 48 hours where there were no new disinformation posts about yours truly pop up on Google searches. So much for Semrush claiming that it could not remove a […]
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“AI”? Facebook’s bot city has already been around for a decade
I’m surprised that people are surprised that this is where Facebook is going. In the words of my friend Richard MacManus, in reference to this interview with Mark Zuckerberg in The Verge: ‘Mark Zuckerberg basically just confirmed that your feeds will soon be full of AI-generated content. Another reason the fediverse needs to exist: so […]
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If you’re still writing disinformation after all this, then tech is your master, and you are the slave
If you peel away the technobabble of what Semrush said to me on Reddit, basically their algorithm messed up when it included an unspaced version of my name. It wasn’t trending. It was just an extrapolation made by an algorithm that, unfortunately, had a very negative consequence for me. But it also didn’t help […]
The trials of removing disinformation from Bluehost
Here’s a company that seems to protect sploggers and disinformation spreaders: Bluehost. One of the disinformation splogs had a Cloudflare account, which hid their real host. I filed a DMCA report, as this splogger was stupid enough to use my photo. These seem to get through the Cloudflare system better than things classified as ‘other’. […]
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Semrush finally explains how my (unspaced) name wound up in their system
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 […]
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Losing your number-two position when switching to HTTPS, 31 months on
In 2022, when the Jack Yan & Associates site went to HTTPS—though some parts of it were on that even in the 2000s—it fell from being second place in Google to below 30th for a search for my name. However, the accepted wisdom was that HTTPS sites outranked HTTP ones on Google. The “experts” all […]
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Semrush doesn’t care about potentially botched data, or resulting disinformation; offers useless advice
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. P.PS., September 20: This is the follow-up. Semrush has responded on Reddit to what I posted yesterday: it helps […]
On the Semrush subreddit: ‘How the Keyword Magic Tool made my year hell’
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 […]
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