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 […]
Read More… from Semrush finally explains how my (unspaced) name wound up in their system
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 […]
Read More… from Losing your number-two position when switching to HTTPS, 31 months on
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 […]
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 […]
Read More… from On the Semrush subreddit: ‘How the Keyword Magic Tool made my year hell’
I haven’t run one of these tests for a while (for eight months), to track how the occidental search engines were doing with the claimed number of pages for a cross-section of websites. Mojeek and, last time I checked, Bing were actually truthful about these numbers. Bing had missed the mark on this for some […]
Read More… from Testing the occidental search engines with site:, June 2024 edition
From me, link removed. Guess what year? There is one thing Google does not seem to do very well any more: search. That’s an exaggeration, but I have been really surprised at things that it has failed to find of late. For example: stuff on this blog. It is not to do with age: Google […]
Read More… from Google’s had issues with PHP pages for a long, long time
You don’t need me keeping score: misdeeds in the tech industry, from Adobe using user content for its “AI” tools to Elon Musk being a Nazi, are a daily occurrence now, and plenty of others are writing about them. At the top end, it seems such a poisonous area to be in, especially with so […]
The web is full of bollocks these days, thanks to Google rewarding junk. Here’s The European Business Review, which looks like a legit publication. Not that you can tell from its website: As their latest print cover is on “AI”, then maybe it is only fitting that their website is stuffed […]
Read More… from Using once-legitimate sites to host SEO spam
Jon Henshaw shared his ‘Small matters’ post recently, and it makes for good reading. One highlight: While the Small Web still exists, most people spend increasingly more time on the Big Web [sites controlled by mega-corporations], and that’s a problem because the walled gardens and algorithms keep us from seeing and experiencing the many extraordinary […]
Maybe I have very rotten timing but out of curiosity, I tried out the Duck Duck Go image search tonight for something that I thought would yield a lot of results. You know I wouldn’t give Google praise freely, but to its credit: I thought: maybe DDG had problems with its […]