Hundreds of people asking the same question.
👉 Can we trust the articles on Search Engine Land after the acquisition?
Mateah Kittle, the Senior Community Manager at Semrush commented on my previous post:
" The SEL team will operate per usual and on their terms, but with more resources so ultimately, marketers will be getting better content. Also, the share of their content that is solely about marketing tools is small, and even then, the contributors will report true to the research and findings. This shift isn’t worth forfeiting your trust in them :)"
I am glad that now we can discuss this question with someone who has direct access to information about the decisions being made on SEL.
Here are my questions:
1. We all saw what happened to Backlinko after the acquisition. How is SEL different and why won't the same thing happen to it?
I don't demand that Semrush behave with their purchase the way I want. I just want them to be honest with the SEO community.
2. How does the SEL team operate per usual and on their terms? Will the advertising model remain the main one for them? Will Ahrefs or Sitechecker be able to buy advertising there?
It's hard to be unbiased about SEO tools if one of the tools is your employer.
I see 3 main options for how Semrush can use SEL for its purposes.
- editing content, where more mentions and links to Semrush will be added, in all ratings, Semrush will be put higher;
- placing banner ads only with Semrush;
- legal parasite SEO campaigns (creation of new content on the site for the most valuable queries, which should be ranked higher in Google SERP where Semrush is not yet ranked).
If the Semrush team says that they will not use any of these points, then what is the purpose of buying SEL? To make money on banner ads :)?
P.S. I added the SEL website to Sitechecker for content change monitoring. So, we can track what happens to the site after the purchase and how much the promises match the actions.
P.P.S. I hope they won't block our bot from crawling the website.
This post was originally shared by Ivan Palii on Linkedin.