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Showing posts from 2026

Semrush Planning to Exit SEO with an X-rated Bang?

Adobe Is Buying Semrush for $1.9 Billion. Here's What Its Traffic Really Looks Like. UPDATE 7 APRIL: Semrush is keeping the questionable sites live. In March the Semrush page for a website (and alternatives to it), was responsible for 5% of the total organic traffic. The domain was banned for being associated with the unspeakable. You will have to figure it out yourself as Blogger is watching me closely. This is the era of branded search - ChatGPT and other AI recommends your brand and you get more branded search at an awesome click through rate. The only problem for Adobe's new website (the deal may not be done yet but it is imminent), is the site sending the most traffic last month was worse than just banned.  Legal risk : Publishing or maintaining lists of sites known for hosting non-consensual or exploitative content can be considered aiding distribution. Even if the list itself doesn’t host the images, it can be treated as a directory to illegal material. Microsoft Copilo...

Backlinko Could Be Demoted in January Google Update Targeting Listicles

 Backlinko Ain't What it Used to be: Key Points  - Top "white-hat SEO blog" owned by SEMRUSH appears to be artificially refreshing old content (date refreshed without significant content changes). - Also appears to be publishing overly self promotional listicles (Google is targeting overly self promotional content this week). Brian Dean created Backlinko in 2012.  ------------------------- Late March 2026 Update: Backlinko does appear to have lost traffic, but a bigger story has emerged. While investigating Semrush's traffic composition using their top competitor's tools, I found a disturbing pattern in Semrush's programmatic "Vs" pages — the automatically generated alternatives and competitors listings. These pages are bringing in huge volumes of estimated traffic according to multiple SEO tools. Some of them target X-rated sites. Some target illegal ones. One tool suggests roughly 5% of Semrush's Google traffic comes from a single page for a ba...

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