SEMRush SEO Spam – A case study in scaled content abuse
SEMRush is engaging in the most common type of SEO spam – scaled content abuse. In this post, I will detail how and why it matters.
For context, this data comes from Ahrefs. This data may not be accurate because Ahrefs has no way of determining SEMRush traffic other than make reasonable estimations based on search volume of keywords and estimation of traffic they receive from these keywords.
Google recently released their site authority abuse update and targeted sites that were abusing their authority, mostly subdomains on authority sites listing coupons via third party vendors. A part of this release was also the “scaled content abuse”.
We’ve long had a policy against using automation to generate low-quality or unoriginal content at scale with the goal of manipulating search rankings. This policy was originally designed to address instances of content being generated at scale where it was clear that automation was involved.
Today, scaled content creation methods are more sophisticated, and whether content is created purely through automation isn’t always as clear. To better address these techniques, we’re strengthening our policy to focus on this abusive behavior — producing content at scale to boost search ranking — whether automation, humans or a combination are involved. This will allow us to take action on more types of content with little to no value created at scale, like pages that pretend to have answers to popular searches but fail to deliver helpful content.
