Bad Faith: GOP, Impeachment and Simple Statistics
Ostensibly, the purpose of public impeachment hearings is to collect testimony from witnesses to determine whether the President has committed impeachable offenses. Unfortunately, these types of public affairs tend to become political theater, as individuals from both parties try to grandstand rather than conduct a proper investigation. Once again, legislators have come under attack for grandstanding rather than properly questioning the witnesses. But is this a fair characterization of the Republican representations? Well, luckily we can use some fairly simple statistics to compare the behavior of the Democrat and Republican representatives in order to determine whether one is acting in bad faith. If the goal of the hearings is to extract testimony from...
Google Cache Banking Accounts
It appears that Google has decided to jump into the banking account game. I am guessing that I will receive some form of communication from Google to hand over this site given its name. The Google Cache started off as a protest site regarding the use of a “Cache” in search results. To this day, I still hold to the principle that “Caching” should be opt-in while “Indexing” should be opt-out. Nevertheless, over the years I have transitioned this into a place of discussion regarding the SEO industry and my research. Rather than offer commentary at this point, I will just point to a number of news articles on the subject matter as details unfold: Nov 13, 2019 Google is getting into banking with the search giant set to offer...
SEMRush Employee Doubles Down on Bizarre, Misleading Link Data
I’d normally let this kind of thing slide, but my integrity has been impugned (Olga Andrienko has accused me of “yellow press type headlines and incorrect data” in her comment on the original post) so I feel obligated to respond. First, let me start by why I used the words “bizarre” and “misleading” and why I stand by them. To be clear, my original post said explicitly that I did not think SEMRush was falsifying data and “I do not think SEMRush is intentionally inflating their numbers“. What makes SEMRush’s Data Bizarre? In SEMRush’s IP reports, they will display all the IP addresses that link to you… [click image for larger picture] However, when you click on the domain number (in this case...
SEMRush IP Link Data Bizarre, Misleading
Disclaimer: I am Russ Jones and I work for Moz, which is a competitor of SEMRush. These are my opinions and do not represent those of Moz. That being said, the data speaks for itself. A response from a SEMRush employee, although not speaking officially, is below. I must admit that I was taken aback when Matthew Woodward’s recent Best Backlink Checker analysis came back so heavily in favor of SEMRush. I knew Matthew did good work and took this project seriously, vetting each provider to the best of his and his teams’ ability given the data they were provided, but it just didn’t mesh with the comparisons I run daily and weekly against Moz’s competitors. (I have spoken with Matthew about this issue and he is currently investigating...
SEMRush vs Moz Link Index Re-verified, Data Provided
Mea Culpa: It looks like I screwed up the exported CSVs from my code below. Thank you to Malte Landwehr of SearchMetrics for finding the bizarre issues. Having an unbiased 3rd party (especially of high reputation like Malte) review is hugely helpful. Malte also identified a high % of .jobs domains in the random data set. Because some crawlers have difficulty with the new TLDs, (I am not sure if this is true of SEMRush), I limited the Domains and URLs to .org, .net, and .com. There were no meaningful changes in the outcomes of the reports EXCEPT for Total Referring Backlinks to URL, in which Moz wins 2x rather than 6x. Comparing Domains [XLSX] Comparing URLs [XLSX] I often do not post data along side these mini research projects such as my most recent brief...
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