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 banned site. I've been sitting on this...
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