Rushing Into Semrush

This presents me with a steep learning curve.

I have been writing online in one way or another for about twenty years. My first paid freelance article was in 2004 or 2005 and at my peak I’d get 100,000 readers on a good day. I’ve written for House, Senate, and Gubernatorial campaigns, as well as a three year run writing a cryptocurrency column in Forbes. I’ve always had some sense of what will or won’t work, but I’ve never done any deep SEO reading. I know there are ad mechanisms but I’ve never earned from or paid for any of that.

So I’m some sort of seasoned rookie, and now it’s time to level up.

Attention Conservation Notice:

We’re going on a Malign Influence Operations Safari. If computational linguistics, network analysis, OSINT methods, and stylometry are not your bag, you will quickly lose your way. If you’re a consumer of such services you can get by just reading the introductions to posts in this area.

Access Levels:

The left side shows the free plan, which I believe matches the $130/month Pro subscription. The right side shows the options when you have a Business plan.

The Pro and Guru accounts do NOT offer API access.

So this whirlwind tour while I’ve got the seven day trial is going to focus on the Pro features. I’ve already got some stuff running with the API and I’m working up to using NetworkX to create GML format graphs that Gephi can use.

Test Case: rauhauser.net:

Using these tools on something that is both familiar to me and accessible to you really limits the options here at the beginning. The only domains I admit to are rauhauser.net and disinfodro.me. As such, my hosting has been limited to Substack and Tumblr.

That’s the summary. My Authority Score of 7 is low and only 39 domains create links to mine, which the industry refers to as backlinks. You can get some statistics and a file of those URLs from the system.

This is the first bit of the backlinks report.

The referring domains are available with some basic information about them.

So this is interesting. Looks like you can have a free account … but it’s not clear how long this lasts. I am NOT going to start the trial at this point, I’m going to give it 24 hours and then see how this extraordinarily limited access works with SEOQuake.

Conclusion:

It’s nice to see there’s a no cost option for checking out SEOQuake/Semrush. I am going to go take the full access account out for a spin. This is exciting, like when I first discovered the amazing reach of RiskIQ.