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RapGenius Growth Hack Exposed
- jgalt212 13y agoYooo waddup! That will be my preferred business salutation going forward.
- antr 13y agoI don't know if this form of dubious back-linking is considered as "growth hacking".
- bigiain 13y agoWell, not until we find out that Mahbod has defected to a competing lyric site, and this is his final "destroy the incumbent competition" action…
- mikkelewis 13y agoAsking people to manually put links in their blog post doesn't seem scalable. In order to rank high for those keywords, you'll need many more backlinks than just a few blog posts.
- ajasmin 13y agoThey're probably just experimenting at that point.
- wwwong 13y agoSo 'growth hacking' has grown to encompass the run of the mill SEO strategy.
- interstitial 13y agoUsually anything with the word 'hacking' in it means some worthless tripe the talentless toss back and forth to prove how they "get it." The root word is 'hack' as in bad writer, not 'hacking' as in coding.
- notatoad 13y agoHas "growth hacking" ever meant anything other than well known tactics that most people are simply too honest to try?
- devanti 13y agoi dont see how they can beat azlyrics and metrolyrics in SEO. I've been using them for over a decade
- Implicated 13y agoYou would be surprised at the volume of true organic links a site like rap genius could generate due to the fact it's actually link-able. RapGenius is cool, people share it. Azlyrics is not cool. (In my best Justin Timberlake voice)
- tomharari 13y agoYou're very spot on here. I wrote a post a year ago on RapGenius and their SEO: http://moz.com/blog/how-i-would-do-seo-for-rap-genius http://moz.com/blog/how-i-would-do-seo-for-rap-genius
- harvestmoon 13y agoI have recommended RapGenius. I have not recommended any other site.
- cphoover 13y agoDoesn't google penalize what they view as attempts to manipulate their algorithm through spamming and link trading. Couldn't this potentially backfire?
- andreasklinger 13y agoYes of course. It is basically a variation of: "Excessive link exchanges ("Link to me and I'll link to you") or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking" plus "Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links" Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
- malloreon 13y agoin this case, however, RG is "linking to you" from twitter's domain, while receiving links from the blogger's domain. To google, this is a one way (non-reciprocal; read: "more valuable") link in RG's favor.
- RBerenguel 13y agoIt's a set of many links in the bottom of a page, mostly unrelated to the main content of the post. This lights many red flags in the Google webspam metrics, I'm pretty sure.
- farnsworth 13y agoRapGenius is my favorite lyrics site, it's a shame they have to do crap like this.
- staunch 13y agoBlackHatSeoGenius.
- dustywusty 13y agoNot exactly genius.
- loumf 13y agoThis is pretty dangerous. If you do it at scale, you get noticed by google and getting noticed isn't a good thing.
- mulligan 13y agoI can only assume this would hurt them since the Panda update by Google a while back. But more importantly: Every instance of one-on-one communication I've seen by Rap Genius (this and the aphyr emails) include over-the-top frat boy style phrases. Are they being sarcastic, is it an affectation, or do they really speak like a parody of every "bro" ever?
- Tossrock 13y agoI met them at YC's Work For A Startup day and they do in fact talk like that. Fun quote from one of the cofounders: >Mr. Ohanian asked the panel, “One of the things I see time and time again is that we have companies who went to the West Coast and then come screaming back to New York. What was the driving force to come back to New York?” Rap Genius’ Ilan Zechory took the question first. “It’s where we lived,” he said. “It’s where our friends were. There are no women in the Bay Area, genuinely. We never considered moving out there. We always felt like our West Coast trips were, like, all of us in a Nissan Xterra, in like a Weston, with some weed, trying to steal bags of money to bring back to the East Coast.”
- benguild 13y agoYikes. Black Hat SEO!
- sbilstein 13y agoyea this is a well known not so nice way to up your google ranking.
- jeffehobbs 13y agoDoes the word "hack" mean anything at all anymore? For that matter, is this really any sort of "Genius"? grumble grumble
- davidw 13y agoYou have to read it as "smurf" when written in certain contexts. "Brainy Smurf, can you smurf me that SERP with some growth smurfing?"
- revelation 13y agoWell it is a hack, in the sense that it is the 1990 idea of hacking your Google rank. Nowadays, all this hack will accomplish is getting them downranked or banned altogether.
- code_duck 13y agoOne would have been a true prophetic genius to be trying this in 1990.
- twic 13y agoNot only that, but Bieber isn't even a rapper! This whole thing is an inverted pyramid of piffle!
- yelnatz 13y agoWow, they write emails the same way they dress up. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo
- the_rosentotter 13y agoI just barfed a little watching that.
- thenmar 13y agoIt's almost a satire of "hip" startup culture. Almost.
- maxcan 13y agoIts like someone wrote Entertainment 720 a check for $15mil
- mladenkovacevic 13y agoI hope those comments continue. After dawg and G, I'm on the edge of my seat to find out what comes next.
- JonnieCache 13y agoIs this a joke? That video did not agree with me. My vision is blurred, and I think I can taste metal...
- minimaxir 13y agoThe aphyr emails are even worse. http://aphyr.com/media/recruiters/rapgenius.txt http://aphyr.com/media/recruiters/rapgenius.txt Link to HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6904224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6904224
- jlgaddis 13y agoViolating Google's ToS doesn't sound like a good way of getting to and/or staying at the top of the SERPs over the long-term.
- slig 13y agoA certain Q/A site has been breaking lots of Google's guidelines for years and they are up and running. Google doesn't seem to care if you're big enough.
- grimtrigger 13y agoCare to explain?
- codinghorror 13y agoI assume you mean Quora, because I know at Stack Exchange we were religious about doing everything the right way. I think Google cares more about the user experience (how bad is it if a user ends up on this page after searching) than the exact letter of the law. The truly sleazy sites usually do badly on both metrics though.
- interstitial 13y agoHe most certainly means Quora, which because of it's dark patterns I refuse to visit even when it ranks. Stack Exchange on the other hand, has another google problem. Many of the top results are "closed as blah blah blah" -- so you arrive from google to a Stack Exchange page which has your exact question, excitedly you click, only to find it closed and unanswered.
- grimtrigger 13y agoJust a heads up, you can search directly on SO and limit your results to answered questions.
- tempestn 13y agoCould SE improve that by generating a sitemap that de-emphasizes closed questions? IIRC Google gives the option to control the relative weighting of various pages without deindexing them entirely. (Although maybe a sitemap on the scale of SO would be problematic in some way? I've certainly never tried to create one that large.)
- zevyoura 13y agoCheck out this comment[0] on this post: >Did you post it??? how about this: attach the HTML to THIS article and I'll tweet this out for you - that would be META! Named as the same guy as the email exchange, Mahbod. [0] http://jmarbach.com/rapgenius-growth-hack-exposed#comment-1175111364 http://jmarbach.com/rapgenius-growth-hack-exposed#comment-11...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- berberous 13y agoFYI, that's one of the 3 co-founders.
- nullymcnull 13y agoWow. Can he really be completely oblivious to the fact that this approach is going to bring the hammer of doom down upon them?
- elwell 13y agoRapGenius is gonna be on the third 'o' soon.
- Untit1ed 13y agoAnd they haven't tweeted his blog post even though he added the HTML! Terrible!
- malloreon 13y agoI'm more disappointed RG considers Bieber "rock"
- ChuckMcM 13y agoSo presumably they are going to keep a list of all those pages they tweeted out so that when their organic rank falls into the depths they can then email back all those people and say "please take down that page you put up with those links on it." That will be particularly true when someone's random blog has a bunch of links to Bieber lyrics on it.
- Scriptor 13y agoThere was a post a bit back (which you might be referencing) about almost this exact situation, except it was about black hat SEO dramatically backfiring. Specifically, businesses were asking bloggers and news sites to delete spam comments that linked back to the sites. The HTML that Mahbod wants you to paste looks pretty similar to what those spam comments were like...
- RBerenguel 13y agoThere's still Disallow in Google Webmaster Tools as a solution for bad back links, either done by an "enemy", old agency or previous stupid SEO manager
- te_chris 13y agoYeah it's there, but it doesn't work anywhere nearly as quickly or effectively as it says it does.
- mdpane 13y ago> There was a post a bit back (which you might be referencing) about almost this exact situation, except it was about black hat SEO dramatically backfiring. Specifically, businesses were asking bloggers and news sites to delete spam comments that linked back to the sites. I believe that would be this great write up on the current situation: http://www.theawl.com/2013/12/the-new-spammer-panic http://www.theawl.com/2013/12/the-new-spammer-panic
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
- halcyondaze 13y agoThis strategy is total fail, Google specifically targeted this stuff with Penguin, which is a relatively old update by now. Combine the scaled approach with posts like this and the fact that Matt Cutts hangs around HN = likely won't end well for them.
- planetx403 13y agohttp://searchengineland.com/matt-cutts-implies-google-is-aware-of-seos-bribing-bloggers-180528 http://searchengineland.com/matt-cutts-implies-google-is-awa...
- grimtrigger 13y agoSomething tells me the RapGenius guys truly believe "any publicity is good publicity". Might be something they learned from the hip-hop industry.
- Sambdala 13y agoWell, they are 'balla-sourcing' now...
- tomrod 13y agoHow can people conduct business like a bad impression of Tom Haverford from Parks and Rec? I think I have too much Ron Swanson in me to take anyone that pushes me like that seriously.
- romanovcode 13y agoMore like John Ralphio.
- zntfdr 13y agocached verison: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fjmarbach.com%2Frapgenius-growth-hack-exposed http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...
- harvestmoon 13y agoThis seems like a bad idea. Google is increasingly good at detecting and punishing unnatural links. This type of tactic is not something I would recommend; search optimization in 2013 is different than it used to be.
- citizens 13y agoHere's where they rank: #1 - Justin Bieber All Bad Lyrics #1 - Justin Bieber Confident Lyric #1 - Justin Bieber Heartbreaker Lyrics #1 - Justin Bieber Memphis Lyrics #1 - Justin Bieber One Life Lyrics #2 - Justin Bieber All That Matters Lyrics #2 - Justin Bieber Hold Tight Lyrics #2 - Justin Bieber Pyd Lyrics #3 - Justin Bieber Change Me Lyrics #3 - Justin Bieber Recovery Lyrics #4 - Justin Bieber Bad Day Lyrics #5 - Justin Bieber Roller Coaster Lyrics #7 - Justin Bieber Lyrics Source: serpscan.com
- antr 13y agoI'd love to hear from Matt Cutts on this
- baby 13y agoThe idea is also to attract young users. They're the future of the company.
- bigiain 13y agoIt'd be fascinating to track this list over time - see how quickly the blackhat seo works, and now that Matt's on the case, just how quickly the Google banhammer falls…
- obstacle1 13y agoHow in the hell is this a 'growth hack'? This is old-school black hat SEO.
- meritt 13y agowhite hat.
- baby 13y agoit's neither of those, but if you had to say on which side it is tilting, then I would say black hat. It's obvious that he's using Google tricks (get good backlinks to get a higher pagerank). That's not white hat SEO at all.
- Killah911 13y agoThis isn't really SEO (i.e. "Optimization" ). It's trying to "hack" search engine traffic artificially. Sure it may be a "legit" move made by many SEO companies, but dumb manipulation like this screws up search for all of us. Where's Matt Cutts? Any comments on this? This is obviously a departure form create great content that others will organically link to. I'd argue that this is just a step above Fiverr SEO.
- elwell 13y agoRapGenius is gonna be on the third 'o' soon.
- PavlovsCat 13y agoEww. A quote by a rap singer comes to mind: Cuz if you go platinum, it's got nothing to do with luck It just means that a million people are stupid as fuck -- Immortal Technique
- krapp 13y agoword.
- avalaunch 13y agoSuggested "rapgenius growth hack" hack: Become affiliate blogger. Add links as requested. Get "MASSiVE traffic" from rapgenius tweets. Remove links.
- Void_ 13y ago"yo wadup" "dope post" "send that shit out"... I love it, it's so nice to read an honest text of marketing email for a change.
- whiddershins 13y agoWhere are you getting search term volume data? Didn't google stop providing specific numbers for search terms recently?
- lnanek2 13y agoShouldn't they have the bloggers include a little JavaScript plugin or something that writes whatever links they need boosted at the moment? Just doing a set of current links seems limiting. I know it has been confirmed the Google bot runs JavaScript and even finds URLs generated by JavaScript. E.g. so they should say: "Just include the RapGenius trending songs widget at the bottom of your site! It lists the latest hot songs on our site: <script ...> "
- sylvinus 13y agoIf it was a JavaScript snippet Google wouldn't index it. They would need a wordpress plugin or something on the backend.
- alxndr 13y agoDoesn't Google's crawler run JS these days?
- Implicated 13y ago...if the javascript snippet spat html onto the page...yes they would.
- minimaxir 13y agoAt that point, I would expect the compensation to be much larger than "a tweet".
- baby 13y agoI feel like the title is looking for drama where there is not. Anyone who has had to deal with growth knows that you need backlinks to get a higher rank in Google. Sponsored blog posts are a thing since blog has been a thing.
- colinbartlett 13y agoIt's pretty sad actually. If they are resorting to this to keep their business afloat, they must be pretty desperate.
- bigiain 13y agoI'd counter "desperate" with "out of touch and badly informed". I have clients come to me quite regularly, having been advised to do something exactly like this - often by a daughters boyfriend or the receptionists brother, or some similarly highly qualified search marketing "professional". I have a list of book marks and questions handy - and always ask them to go back to their original source of the idea and ask questions like "What are the implications of Google's Hummingbird(|PayDayLoad|Panda|Penguin|Caffiene|Vince|Dewey) update on this strategy?" and "Has Matt Cutts (or Vanessa Fox) ever discussed this idea?" - while having primed them to be able to judge whether the person giving the advice knows anything about what they're talking about. It _almost_ always works.
- 001sky 13y agoNotwithstanding all of these excellent points, is the timing. Jacking up traffic or revenues or other valuation metrics at the end of the {month/year/quarter} is a typical act of desperation/opportunism. It may explain why the bothered to try an implement/get away with it. Like you say it doesn't pass a certain smell test.
- Matt_Cutts 13y agoWe're investigating this now.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mikeg8 13y agoWhoa! Was not expecting that so quickly...
- hazelnut 13y agoit would be great if you could provide an update about it later on. thanks for taking care about this.
- benigeri 13y agoIs this against policy?
- belluchan 13y agoTit for tat links should be against policy. Google's search results become quality when people naturally link to something as part of a conversation or sharing.
- notastartup 13y agoIS this the real matt cutts????! what happens if someone is caught manipulating the SERP like this? Does google automatically ban this practice? Why wasn't this caught before? They are backed by $15 million dollars I can't believe they'd resort to this.
- nfm 13y agoI was under the impression this kind of thing - a stack of links at the bottom of content, with the same links duplicated across many posts/domains - was automatically penalized through the floor.
- AznHisoka 13y ago"We're investing this now". Those 4 words are the Kiss of Death.
- jrochkind1 13y agoI like that RapGenius had the chutzpah to allow that post exposing their scheme -- a scheme unlikely to be smiled upon by Google -- to participate in that very same scheme. Except, have they actually tweeted the post as they promissed? Sadly, it does not appear so, it would somehow be especially pleasing if they then tweeted out a link to the post exposing their scheme.
- bredren 13y agoGrowth Hacks Gone Wild!
- jimmytucson 13y agoI just find their "yooo waddup homeeey" white-boy street talk obnoxious, if not borderline offensive.
- bigiain 13y agoPart of me suspects there's a very smart marketer/psychologist working with them, who's intentionally using that language to not just target their core demographic, but also to actively deter people not in their demographic - much the same as the speculation that some spam email is so badly written because the spammer is intentionally appealing to less educated people and actively discouraging people who value "proper" grammar and spelling. "We want the Beliebers to look up to us as their cool older brothers, and we want our competition and the tech crowd (and specifically Matt Cutts) to ignore us and disregard us as ignorant 'bros…" The other part of me suspects they're actually idiots as they seem - and that Andreessen Horowitz's $15mil investment in them is just proof that the handbasket we're all traveling in has crossed the event horizon…
- goldenkey 13y agoWaddup mah HackerNews son, u Dillon dat old phish raw? Yah affiliate profs be sappin mah sentry, Kahn!
- TeMPOraL 13y agoCthulhu fhtagn.
- Ryanmf 13y ago"TONE-DEAF DOUCHE EXPOSES ONE WEIRD TRICK TO GET YOU MASSIVE TRAFFIC AND HELLA BACKLINKS!" "MATT CUTTS HATES HIM"
- SolarUpNote 13y agoThat's whack!
- morganb180 13y agoThis is not "black hat" SEO. This is dumb SEO. Real black hats aren't so obvious/careless/thoughtless.
- LordHumungous 13y agoI would've thought Google would be smart enough to ignore multiple anchor tags pointing to the same domain on one page.
- Log1x 13y ago"growth hack" lol
- sunspeck 13y agoFar cleverer RapGenius growth hack exposed: RG has seemingly generated a unique URL w/<title> for each line of each of each song listing. Google slurps these up and gives them prominent SERP rankings, though the links are all just doorways redirecting to the main song page. (Albeit, redirecting to an anchor at the lyric queried, with highlighting effect and annotation popup to boot. Pretty friendly UX.) Eg. http://rapgenius.com/9208/Ice-cube-it-was-a-good-day/Today-i-didnt-even-have-to-use-my-ak http://rapgenius.com/9208/Ice-cube-it-was-a-good-day/Today-i... Thus one song with a remix or two might become 469 search results: https://www.google.com/search?q=And+if+I+hit+the+switch%2C+I+can+make+the+ass+drop&oq=And+if+I+hit+the+switch%2C+I+can+make+the+ass+drop&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64l3.1250j0j7&bmbp=0&sourceid=chrome&espvd=215&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8#es_sm=91&q=%22And+momma+cooked+a+breakfast+with+no+hog%22+site%3Arapgenius.com&safe=off https://www.google.com/search?q=And+if+I+hit+the+switch%2C+I...
- presty 13y agothat's pretty clever!
- roel_v 13y agoNo it's not, it's 2005-style SEO spamming and will get them their asses kicked in ranking soon (if not already).
- riffraff 13y agoI am not sure I understand why this is considered bad, such pages should have very low pagerank anyway (no incoming links) but they do make sense for someone searching some lyrics' lines. What am I missing?
- roel_v 13y agoThey are pages with different url's pointing to the same page, without doing an actual redirect. Since url's are a big component of the keywords Google considers, doing that has been an SEO no-no for years.
- normloman 13y ago"Growth Hacking" now a euphemism for Spamdexing.
- zoltar92 13y agoI'm so confused at this backlash, this is hacker news- mahbod, tom and the rapgenius team have built an amazing product, and found a clever way to help with search engine optimization. Good for them. They're optimizing EVERYONES search experience- I think it's ridiculous in this case for them not to have preferential page rank... If the average user would prefer them over a competitor ( which I beg someone to argue) then who cares if they creatively by-passed some ambiguous google guidelines.
- ysekand 13y agoI have just published a short but revealing post on this http://www.rocketmill.co.uk/hideous-seo-strategy-rap-genius http://www.rocketmill.co.uk/hideous-seo-strategy-rap-genius
- rhizome 13y agoTheir business depends on their search engine ranking position (SERP’s) on Google. Am I the only one who thought, "SERP," meant, "Search Engine Result Page?"