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Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes
- minimaxir 13y agoIt's worth noting that Rap Genius was not penalized on Bing. (and Yahoo which uses Bing). RG may want to consider a hedge bet on search engines.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- chaz 13y agoWow, that's a very stiff penalty if they're not even turning up for their own brand name. It will likely cost them millions. It's a clear warning to all sites out there to avoid similar tactics.
- yogo 13y agoI feel for them. At the end of the day business is suffering. However, a high profile example of the consequences of using these myopic tactics is also good.
- donthe 13y agoThey're aren't currently monetizing their site at all, no ads, so how will it cost them millions? The VC's already know that the founders are a bunch of fruitcakes. I think they'll be right back where they left off after the penalty is lifted, probably in 30 days. When the same thing happens to other small websites than those websites are literally destroyed, no 30 day penalties, banned for life. Shut down your website and start again.
- knes 13y agoJust did a quick "bieber heartbreaker lyrics" query and couldn't find them in the first 10 pages of results... Outch, this is going to hurt them.
- jere 13y agoExcellent. They deserved some coal in their stockings. >If you go to Google and search for [rap genius], rapgenius.com will not be found on the first page That's pretty crazy. Whenever I put up an obscure site, I notice ranking on the domain happens almost immediately with no effort. [edit] Holy shit, I didn't realize quite how awful this is. Very often, I search for "<song name> rapgenius" because I really enjoy the annotations; that's not even on the first page of results. Making it worse, the first page (even when searching for a song) contains stories about them making rape jokes and spamming. https://www.google.com/search?q=today+was+a+good+day+rapgenius https://www.google.com/search?q=today+was+a+good+day+rapgeni...
- kintamanimatt 13y ago5th page for "rapgenius" There are two lessons here: (1) don't do shady shit, (2) Google should only be one of many sources of traffic.
- girvo 13y agoFor lyrics sites, Google is the alpha and the omega. There are no other traffic sources for that niche.
- bushido 13y agoWow! Just checked and they ranked 59th for "rap genius" and 51st for "rapgenius" on google.
- anatoly 13y ago"<song name> site:rapgenius.com" should help.
- adventured 13y agoThe penalty that has been applied will degrade heavily with time. Rap Genius will have an opportunity to rebuild their ranking in the coming months. I suspect they'll be fine, as the product is solid; so clean-up in aisle three, and then business as usual. They're also very well capitalized to withstand this.
- 13y ago
- usaphp 13y agoWhy did not they penalize their competitor websites which are using the same (even worse) tactics?
- k-mcgrady 13y ago>> "Why did not they penalize their competitor websites which are using the same (even worse) tactics?" Source? Proof? RG was penalised because their method were made public and Google was made aware of it. If there is proof other sites are doing the same (I don't doubt they are but proof is needed) I'm sure Google will penalise them too.
- usaphp 13y agoAs I remember, In the "apology" letter RG provided a list of resources that prove that other websites are doing the same thing.
- chinmoy 13y agoWhat they provided wasn't exactly 'proof'. Without any conclusive ground they accused other lyrics sites. Linking to Open Site Explorer and saying they they think some links might be suspicious hardly counts as proof, IMO. Besides, now that the matter has been brought under Google's attention, they'll of course penalize the other lyric sites too, if any violation is found. But in case of RG, it was all out in the open and I think that's why action was quick.
- Grue3 13y agoTheir "proof" was a load of crap. AZLyrics has several lyric websites for specific genres (punk, metal, and so on) which are actually really good if you're a fan of that specific genre. Of course these sites link to each other because they're a part of the same company. It isn't anything like what RG is doing.
- jsumrall 13y agoIts very scary to build your business on being ranked high on Google. When you build your house on sand...
- amandabertha 13y agoMore like... when your entire business is built on google rankings maybe you should consider reading their rules. Closely. This is a case of Rap Genius brazenly breaking the rules and thinking they can get away with it because of their gilded connections (their spoiled frat boy persona seems to reflect the reality of their behaviour: thinking they're too rich and connected for the rules to apply). Acting like a clown, like Donald Trump, definitely gets you money and exposure. But personally I wouldn't take any amount of money if it meant I became a person making public rape jokes, making startup culture even more sexist, regressive, pathetic... not to mention racist. Their tongue-in-cheek appropriation of black english is mocking both the rap community as well as the poor black AND white communities that actually use that language for serious (and have no chance of going to elite schools let alone getting a half decent education). Anyway Rap Genius is a nice service (and I'm a fan of hip hop) but the behavior of the founders is disgusting. Shameful behavior does not suddenly become cool just because it can make you a hundred million dollars. Capitalists always sell away their values eventually. It's sick. Know what's cooler than a billion dollars? Being a decent human being.
- glass_of_water 13y agoI think this could be a deathblow to Rap Genius. I performed the following searches in an incognito tab and could not find rapgenius in the first two pages of results (I did not look beyond the first two pages): "rap god eminem lyrics" "machine gun funk rap lyrics" "lose yourself eminem lyrics"
- couradical 13y agoit looks like they might have stopped showing "rapgenius.com" in non site-specific results. Searching for "rap genius eminem lose yourself" doesn't give any results in the top 5 pages. The only time I can see results from them is by adding a "site:" modifier to the search. I think you're right, that depending on how long this lasts, they could be in a world of hurt.
- poopicus 13y agoDamn, I tried searching up some rap lyrics that I knew worked a couple of days ago, no dice. How long does this penalisation last?
- ddoolin 13y agoThe sad part is that RG was the most high quality lyrics site I've seen. Their revenue is going to take a huge dive, much more than their link scheming was hurting Google (or probably anyone else for that matter).
- calbear81 13y agoIt doesn't matter that they had the best experience and content because Google was forced to do this to set an example and show that they aren't playing favorites. Imagine other companies who will start testing more black hat strategies with the expectation that it's okay as long as they believe they're better than sites ranking higher than them.
- girvo 13y agoYou know what? If they actually are better, then that's only a good thing in my opinion. Who cares about "fairness" here, we want the best results. That's one way of looking at it anyway.
- ddoolin 13y agoI agree it was what they should've done. At the very least it was the right direction. Hopefully their reputation is enough to keep them afloat while they build up again.
- SwellJoe 13y agoI suspect the several million in funding they've taken can also keep them afloat for a little while.
- captainmuon 13y agoIts also sad thay they went about it in such a stupid, stupid way. They could have built a nice "Link to your favorite lyrics" widget for people to include in their "homepages". Make the appearance customizable, jumble the HTML, and include some stock bla bla to make it "individual" and to appeal to google. Then announce a competition. We'll showcase the best homepages that link to our lyrics in the most creative way. Maybe give away some silly prizes. Completely legal, nothing for Google to complain about, but gives you the same effect very cleverly. Instead they did this brazen crap... makes them look very amateurish. Technically not very different, but the tone is completely different, and Google had no choice but to penalize it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- selmnoo 13y agoTried all of these just now: Justin Bieber All Bad Lyrics Justin Bieber Confident Lyric Justin Bieber Heartbreaker Lyrics Justin Bieber Memphis Lyrics Justin Bieber One Life Lyrics Justin Bieber All That Matters Lyrics Justin Bieber Hold Tight Lyrics Justin Bieber Pyd Lyrics Justin Bieber Change Me Lyrics Justin Bieber Recovery Lyrics Justin Bieber Bad Day Lyrics Justin Bieber Roller Coaster Lyrics Justin Bieber Lyrics All of these just yesterday were in fact ranked in the upper 5 (very often #1 actually). Rapgenius results are now not even in top 10. Most surprisingly, even Justin Bieber Heartbreaker rap genius will not show up on Google results. Wow, that was a swift and harsh response. The only surefire way to get to a RG site is by doing "*bieber site:rapgenius.com". They were using a wide array of questionable SERP optimizing techniques (http://www.rocketmill.co.uk/hideous-seo-strategy-rap-genius http://www.rocketmill.co.uk/hideous-seo-strategy-rap-genius among others). One described here is very interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6958883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6958883. Apparently that's an old one, but it's first I'm hearing of it. From all of this, to their rape jokes and everything else in-between, you can't say they didn't have something like this coming.
- rapemaster 13y agoI liked their rape jokes. Grow a sense of humour.
- larksimian 13y agoQuite frankly not showing me rapgenius results when that's one of the search terms is idiotic. I guess now I have to remember to go straight to their site whenever I'm looking up lyrics. I'm glad I at least know about them and I feel bad for the people that are now going to be trapped in craplyrics.com hell. I understand and agree with google's desire to punish spammers but their effort should not have such a major impact on users who obviously know what they are looking for.
- weixiyen 13y agoJust wow. I think the intention was to make an example of Rap Genius for other companies. I honestly had no idea how severe these violations were until now.
- nswanberg 13y agoWe are all much better off now that azlyrics.com is back to its rightful place at the top of the lyric search results. Rap Genius alleges that their competitors are using the same tactics. Will those sites also get the same scrutiny? Perhaps now would be a good time for a new lyric site run by some nice bland people to go on the offensive and rise to the top.
- selmnoo 13y agoSo, the only reason RG in the first place was able to provide lyrics with no spam at no costs is because they were riding on VC money. Other lyrics sites have to make money somehow. But then you might say -- well, what does that matter to the audience? The answer is, usually the spam-free groovy train usually does eventually come to an end. Sites can go on for long periods of time serving straight up spam/ad-free content, but that always ends. Who knew what RG was intending to do after this ended? Would they have gone the Facebook route of datamining the hell out of Biebers fan to advertise them shit they don't need? One last thing to keep in mind: Rapgenius was an unlicensed lyric site. They weren't playing ball on either side of the fence. Let's hope that a lyric site emerges that provides lyrics with at least acceptable, non-distracting ads, and serves licensed content. I really think merely going by this strategy will get you ranked high on Google.
- nswanberg 13y agoIt makes sense that a site needs business model to be sustainable, but Rap Genius is still searching for or developing their model. It does not appear to be based on displaying ads alongside lyrics, and that also is not the main point of their site. Rap Genius was originally called Rap Exegesis, and while it has a lot of rap lyrics it is a community supported text annotation site, with an ambition far beyond a lyric repository. They have a great deal of content beyond rap, or even lyrics in general. They have poetry and literature, announcements, and press releases (I'd love to see them make a Rap Genius page of Ulysses with the contents of Ulysses Annotated). They have a platform and are building a community. That's why it's attractive to VCs, and that's why it's something beyond the eyesores one mostly lands on searching for lyrics.
- 13y ago
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- krapp 13y agoI wonder if Rap Genius thinks their scheme was worth it in retrospect.
- skinnycow 13y agoThat's the exact same logic as victim blaming. The person who posted it has no obligation to white wash YC funded companies.
- arkitaip 13y agoVery bizarre line of thinking when you put blame on the HN poster and not Rap Genius for doing all kinds of black hat SEO.
- mlyang 13y agoIt's obviously wrong what Rap Genius did, no doubt about it. They should not have used these techniques. But, it's not a bizarre line of thinking to think of whether the person who posted it finds it to be worth it after the fact given the severity of the repercussion (which could effectively ruin the whole business).
- adharmad 13y agoRG's techniques were not honest and were costing other sites that were using legitimate techniques and playing by the rules their ranking in Google's search results (and maybe even revenue).
- hbags 13y agomlyang: It is absolutely a bizarre first reaction to imply that the reporter should feel culpable for the harm that RapGenius caused themselves. If RapGenius is ruined that easily, RG didn't have a real business to begin with. Their scheme was something that would've certainly triggered Google's ban-hammer sooner or later; the only question was timing. My bet is that RG will reexamine and improve their distribution playbook. I say this because I don't think a16z would invest in a company whose distribution plans consisted solely of SEO. But you could be correct. Maybe RG is such a fragile company that this nearly inevitable setback is enough to kill them. p.s. just an FYI: it's generally considered bad form to delete a post that has already garnered responses, especially if those responses are critical.
- deanclatworthy 13y agoLet's not feel sorry for these guys just because they were part of YC. They were taking part in black-hat practices, which were clearly in breach of Google's ToS. I expect this penalty to expire eventually, but let this be a lesson to anyone else thinking about doing the same.
- elwell 13y agoI'd like to see if they penalize other lyrics companies similarly and commensurately though...
- pccampbell 13y agoMy bigger issue is with the fact that they're able to "negotiate" with Matt Cutts and team while thousands of other sites don't have that bargaining power. Started a discussion on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964169
- paulrademacher 13y agoWhy do you think they negotiated at all?
- 001sky 13y agoAgree, Is there any evidence this happened?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ben0x539 13y agoI'm shocked to see that their previous fairly good ranking has been fraudulent all along.
- girvo 13y agoI don't think it was. I think this is a huge penalty, not a correction.
- badman_ting 13y agoDisagree, it's the best lyrics site by a country mile. Every other single one of them is dogshit (except OHHLA.com).
- ljlolel 13y agoTry this: [bieber heartbreaker lyrics rap genius] or even [bieber heartbreaker lyrics rapgenius.com]
- captainmuon 13y agoI wonder how many "legitimate" links a site like RapGenius gets. I've never seen anybody link to them, except maybe in social networks. Similar for the stackexchange sites. Sometimes people link to good questions from blogs, but a large portion of links are probably from other stackexchange sites, twitter, and Jeff Atwood's blog (which is a marvel of SEO and affilate marketing in itself). For many of these high quality content silos (for lack of a better word), the PageRank paradigm seems pretty broken. People don't feel compelled to link to well-known sites precisely because they are well-ranked. And when they do, it is in form of viral posts in social networks, which is not really a great input to determine site quality. I wouldn't be surprized if Google's real secret algorithm nowadays consists of millions of special cases maintained by thousands of poorly paid interns.
- judk 13y agoWhy poorly paid?
- captainmuon 13y agoIt's the cliche. But you're right, the most menial worker at google earns probably a lot more then I do (in academia). I don't know...
- jlees 13y agoI was thinking something along the same lines. PageRank was great back in the day, but in today's world, the link is not the only way of determining whether a site is good or not. I wonder if a rethink of the HITS model or a complete overhaul of search ranking based on social and reputation cues is in order? StackOverflow does well despite few people linking to them because the search terms are so niche, if I search for a fairly generic programming term I maybe get one StackOverflow post in the first 10 but if I search for an error message, they'll all be SO. Other StackExchange sites maybe don't benefit quite so well from that long tail, though. Sites like Quora presumably have the same problem. It's interesting how sites like these, and in turn mobile apps, are turning information into vertical silos (which want you to stay within their bounds) rather than the horizontal web of equality we're used to. (Also, the interns are pretty well paid, but yes. They start out as autocompleters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blB_X38YSxQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blB_X38YSxQ)
- mrcactu5 13y agoCan someone explain to me why Google is formalizing this against Rap Genius? I really like their n-gram viewer of the New York Times wedding announcements. http://blog.visual.ly/rap-genius-new-project-visualizes-30-years-of-new-york-times-wedding-data/ http://blog.visual.ly/rap-genius-new-project-visualizes-30-y... I would be interested in learning what they have to say about NLP (Natural Language Processing) since they deal with language which is quite vernacular.
- lopatin 13y agoI can't imagine that this is permanent. Rap Genius is actually one of the most high quality lyrics sites out there, not another spam farm. So removing them for good actually reduces the quality of Google's search results. I do suspect that because of the attention this once case received, and since Matt Cutts was personally looking into the company's SEO tactics (talk about bad luck), they issued a public, but temporary, slap. That would serve as an eye opener to Rap Genius about how dangerously they're playing the SEO game and a warning to everyone else tuning in.
- georgemcbay 13y agoIf the "slap" is too temporary then it backfires as a deterrent because such a slap would teach future companies that you might as well game the system and then accept your small, temporary punishment if you do happen to get caught, which you might not in the first place if you are more clever about doing it than the rapgenius guys were. There's really no point to Google making public spectacle of a penalty that might end up so temporary as to be toothless. In any case, I find it hard to shed a tear for these guys, they either knew full well that they were flagrantly disobeying the Google rules or they are incredibly stupid. And unlike some others I'm not so surprised that their previously high ranking might have been gamed because they are one of a set of companies I know of that has huge mindshare with the HN/startup crowd, but virtually none with people I know who aren't part of that first group.
- extempo 13y agoIt's not permanent. Google wants to make a point, they turn off the traffic faucet, Rap Genius repents, and things slowly return back to normal. They don't even rank for "rap genius" right now. Their Facebook page does though.
- loceng 13y agoYou don't think this gives competitors a chance to compete better?
- dangrossman 13y agoThis just makes Google less useful. RG had the best lyrics and annotations for lots of songs. Now Google sends me to barely-readable sites that only exist to show as many ads as possible per page, even if I include "rap genius" in the search.
- olalonde 13y ago> This just makes Google less useful. In the short term. In the long term, this move probably has prevented a lot of black hat SEO and spam from happening on the web.
- captainmuon 13y agoWe should start the same kind of campaign to add these kind of links to the bad lyrics sites. Maybe Google will penalize them too. Btw., duckduckgo still shows rapgenius on top.
- ryanhuff 13y agoYou could always go direct to RG.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dangrossman 13y agoThat's beside the point. Millions of people that search Google for lyrics every month getting sent to worse sites is a problem for Google, not for me.
- AznHisoka 13y agoThe disappearance of 1 lyrics site(albeit a good one) from the face of Earth doesn't even come closing to putting a deny into Google's search quality. There are a million other sites out there. RapGenius is the one that has lost, not Google
- llamataboot 13y ago
- xkarga00 13y agoThese guys will never grow up
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- skndr 13y agoIt's a pyrrhic victory. Now, the best lyrics site can't be found and Google itself is less useful for it. At least https://duckduckgo.com/?q=it+was+a+good+day+rapgenius https://duckduckgo.com/?q=it+was+a+good+day+rapgenius seems to work fine.
- seoguy 13y ago100% agreed, google cut off their nose to spite their face here.
- siliconviking 13y agoFor what it's worth, they use Yahoo's search API.
- usaphp 13y agoThat just proves how google search algorithms become inaccurate. I agree, RapGenius did some shady things, BUT it still has a better content then other websites which are now ranked much higher.
- girvo 13y agoWe always talk about not building a business on someone else's API... Funnily enough, you could almost say that applies here. Gone from any SERPS, entirely. Crazy. I dislike that Google has this much power sometimes :(
- johnpowell 13y agoThey seem to be using Quantcast and are directly measured. This should be interesting over the next week. https://www.quantcast.com/rapgenius.com https://www.quantcast.com/rapgenius.com
- bluthru 13y agoI really hate how one search engine can make or break a site. We live in the AOL dark ages and most don't even realize it.
- adharmad 13y agoCare to elaborate? RG clearly broke the rules and forced google's hand here. Google has to protect the integrity of their search results against such gaming, else a day might come when all of Google's search results are due to black-hat SEO and Google's brand itself would be worthless. This would be the equivalent of Walmart/Safeway refusing to carry some company's products because of {false/mis}-representation.
- bluthru 13y agoI don't disagree with what Google did at all, and I don't agree with what Rap Genius did. What I'm saying is that when there isn't a lot of competition in the search space, businesses will use underhanded tactics to game a certain search engine. Having so much depend on a single entity is antithetical to the web and good, competitive business practices.
- adharmad 13y agoGoogle's response does seem a bit heavy-handed. Under less public circumstances, maybe a strong warning would have sufficed. However, the public nature in which RG got caught forced their hand. Google could not afford to be seen as condoning such an obvious transgression of their rules with a slap on the wrist.
- dandelany 13y agoAgain you miss the point, which is not to debate about the correctness of Google's decision, but the fact that one search engine can make the entire difference between a company being successful and not. This lack of competition is surely a bad thing, even if the decision to penalize RG specifically was a good decision.
- bushido 13y agoAccording to alexa their top 10 traffic sources are: google.com - 35.7%; youtube.com - 4.4%; google.co.uk - 4.0%; facebook.com - 3.9%; google.de - 3.5%; google.ca - 3.1%; google.co.in - 2.6%; google.fr - 2.5%; google.com.tr - 1.5%; google.es - 1.1%; Except for facebook all it top sources are Google owned(58.4%). This will truly be disasterous for their revenues. Considering they rank 59th for "rap genius" and 51st for "rapgenius" on Google. There are tons of lessons to be learned here. Don't depend on a single source for traffic and most of all don't excessively try gaming the system, the system usually catches up.
- Goopplesoft 13y agoI think the true lesson is more a compound of those things: Don't depend on a single source for traffic and if you do don't try gaming that source. Relying on Google is likely a lyric industry standard.
- pcooelt 13y agothe biggest lesson is don't brag about it in public!
- camus2 13y ago> Don't depend on a single source for traffic Sure , now tell me what other search engine has the same market shares as Google. Answer : none , there is no competition in SEO, there is only Google. If there was some real competition , Google would not be so arsh. There is only one lesson to be learned here : Since one depends on google for SEO, one should not try to game Google. because today basically , if you are not in google results you dont exist on the web.
- seoguy 13y agoCertainly a harsh blow and a lesson learned, but not the lesson you think. The lesson is to not allow a third party "black box" to be the central traffic source for the monetization model of your business. Rapgenius understood this well and does have an excellent community on boarding strategy, but was still heavily reliant on google as a main pillar of its customer acquisition model. I've lost one Alexa top 2000 site to a google penalty, and several smaller sites, saw this coming miles away. I know exactly what they are going through, never forget the day when my JV partner called me at 4AM and told me the apocalypse scenario has happened. Even worst than the financial blow of losing a $30k a day advertising property, was the brutal realization of googling your brands name and seeing it not show up. Going in to analytics real time and seeing a sub 100 number for the first time in 6 months was quite an eery feeling as well. Google did this to set an example, and they will be reinstated worst case in 6 months.
- ateevchopra 13y agoInterestingly now on searching Rap Genius on google, articles about them getting penalised are coming on the first 3 pages.
- sneak 13y agoIt's super lame that Google penalizes individual cases versus just fixing their algorithms across the board, because it means that other sites that employ similar techniques and aren't high-profile/useful enough to get posted about to HN are able to continue unimpeded.
- chaz 13y agoNo need to pick between the two. Google does both.
- rubiquity 13y agoI think this is a great lesson in the disparity between two things: 1. Breaking rules 2. Not being liked and breaking rules
- walshemj 13y ago3 Not getting Caught
- AznHisoka 13y agoLooks like ordinary visitors can't even find their site now: https://twitter.com/fuckshivan/status/415879789522587648 https://twitter.com/fuckshivan/status/415879789522587648 The power of Google.
- OoTheNigerian 13y agoWow. This is the worst Christmas present possible. Well, Google had no choice and the apology was not a stellar one (not that it could have mattered). If I recall correctly, Google once penalized Google Chrome for doing shady SEO [1]. Although it was not as brutal as this which sends them to the equivalent of Siberia. My Questions. 1. I normally search "<song name> rapgenius". Now, it is no longer on the first few pages. Is that not against Google's goal of giving the searcher what (s)he wants? 2. Probably the only way for RapGenius to counter this would be to go heavy on AdWords. Is that not a bit conflicted on Google's side? Hopefully this punishment will not be permanent. I would hope they have learned to tone things down sometimes. This may be a lesson in disguise as they would be forced to think of how to survive without SEO. If they can survive now, they will be doubly badass when this penalty is lifted. -- Edited to include source [1] http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pagerank-reduced-due-to-sponsored-posts-106551 http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pag...
- asdfologist 13y agoGoogle penalized Chrome, their own product? Source?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- chaz 13y agohttp://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pagerank-reduced-due-to-sponsored-posts-106551 http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pag...
- girvo 13y agoBut, google do have a choice? This is human stuff here, not an algorithm. I'm not going to argue about whether Google should have or not, but saying they "had no choice" isn't correct IMO.
- proexploit 13y ago
- Xorlev 13y agoJust goes to show, invest in some real marketing, make something really valuable to someone rather than relying on 'growth hacks' that tend to explode in your face.
- walshemj 13y agoOr hire experienced white hat growth hackers with experience working with big brands.
- gfodor 13y agoHow does this show that? All this shows is that there is risk do doing growth hacks. It does nothing to show if these hacks are worth the risk. Rap Genius, is, after all, the most well known and successful site for rap lyrics as far as I know, so (ethics notwithstanding) unless this kills their business, it was a smart move.
- largehotcoffee 13y agoHonestly Rap Genius isn't that appealing of a site and the design is pretty terrible. It's incredibly difficult to read anything on the page (azlyrics is actually better at this). I really hope someone new comes along and makes a better site with the same premise (annotating lyrics).
- Nursie 13y agoGoogle's revenue depends on providing the best results it can to searchers, within limits of result pollution they do themselves (clearly demarked advertising at present). If they allow cynical SEO then the results get worse for everyone and people will look for alternatives. I'm glad they have a proactive slap-down policy. Let's not go back to the late 90s and the likes of altavista, when you might have got one hit in ten pages of spam, SEO link farms.
- tomasien 13y agoHow long will this last? Rap Genius is a fantastic asset to the world, I hope this isn't permanent.
- OmarIsmail 13y agoGoogle giveth, and Google taketh away. This looks like a -50 penalty. This is both good and bad for Rap Genius. Good in that it will be temporary: specifically 30 days. This is better than a fundamental algorithm change like Panda or Penguin because there's no coming back from those. The bad is that -50 penalties effectively destroy 90+ percent of your traffic. It's a very harsh lesson to be taught. You also don't want to have it happen again because the 2nd time is 60 days, and the 3rd time is permanent. I don't think RapGenius will be doing something like this again. From RG's perspective it's also frustrating because they'll see competitors do scammy things and get away with it. But that's the dual edged sword of such public personas. With RG getting called out so publicly Google had to do something about it. It's also good for Google that this penalty is getting a lot of publicity since it's proving an example to everyone else.
- dpatrick86 13y agoWhere are you getting this number system from? I've never heard of it until now.
- OmarIsmail 13y agoPersonal experience. This was many years ago though (> 5) so likely the numbers have changed since then.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nathancahill 13y ago-50 is the number of results they were bumped down. If you search "rap genius" you'll find it on the 5th page.
- dpatrick86 13y agoAhh... Thank you for the clarification. :)
- pcooelt 13y agofyi I grapped a rank report from a few days ago from some of their popular kwds. Looks like they are down 4-6 pages on average: http://cdn.elite-strategies.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/rap-genius-penalty.png http://cdn.elite-strategies.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/r...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- qq66 13y agoWhen you don't get Rapgenius when you search "Bieber Rapgenius," you know that Google is forgoing its mission of serving users and instead just flexing its big muscles for everyone to see.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- zoltar92 13y agoThis is absolutely rediculous, google is upholding it's rules but forgetting the POINT of the rules. The whole point is to make the most relevant results come up on google searches. The fact that rapgenius needs to "hack their way" to higher link relevancy seems like a internal google problem and penalizing them makes googles results LESS relevant. Tl;dr google's cutting off their nose in spite of their face.
- lando2319 13y agoQuestion: From Google's perspective how exactly does Google lower the ranking for Rap Genius? I imagine they have some sort of 'naughty' list. Does Google just discount the rankings by some number they determine is fair? And is this effect permanent? If Rap Genius plays by the rules and still manages to have good SEO, will they eventually bubble back up to the top or are they officially doomed to lower rankings?
- itsprofitbaron 13y agoWhilst this may be surprising to some people on HN, this happens all of the time to sites who build links in an unnatural way. For instance, this has happened in the past to well known brands such as J.C Penney through NYTimes expose[1], Interflora[2] more recently and a lots of others. An apology which RapGenius offered [3] doesn't fix this either. Is it fair? Yes and No. The only reason it isn't fair is that the site disappears from Google for the BRAND term e.g. [rap genius]. My personal belief is that, devaluing the site for the BRAND term e.g. [rap genius] actually devalues Google's quality. On the other side of the coin, if someone searches for [X rap genius] whilst they are under penalty its fair that they do not rank for that either. However, there are obvious reasons as to why the search quality team have decided to do this. How RapGenius can fix it / How you can too if your site gets a penalty: First of all, RapGenius if they are doing any link building now they should pause it immediately until they’re out of penalty. Secondly, in their apology [3] said: "With limited tools (Open Site Explorer), we found some suspicious backlinks to some of our competitors" They don't actually need to use any other tool to get out of penalty beyond Google Webmaster Tools although, ideally they should clean up all the links beyond the ones Google has found (trust me, Google doesn’t find them all within WMTs). Once you get out of a Google manual penalty and get hit by one again the search quality team takes a much closer look – you don’t want that! Anyway, they should download all the links in WMTs, OSE, Majestic etc (although it looks like they only have OSE[3] so they should just download them from WMTs and OSE) and then remove the duplicates. Once they’ve done this, they should flag every single link which, they believe is causing the penalty. After identifying all the links which are causing the penalty, they should create a Gmail to outreach to all of the sites to remove the links. They should outreach to all these sites and documents all the sites they’ve contacted, status – still live/nofollow/removed/requested payment/no response etc. Having got some links removed/nofollowed etc, they should then disavow all the other sites that have requested payment or not given them response to the removal. Personally, the disavow(s) that are done by myself are usually done at the domain level although, there are reasons to do this at the URL level as well (Rap Genius needs to make the decision which one to disavow). After submitting the disavow they, should submit a reconsideration request which outlines, the work they have done – from the spreadsheet – and also offer Google’s Search Quality Team the login to the Gmail to show they’ve tried to get the links removed and that some people have asked for payment etc. The Google Search Quality team will review the site then, they’ll either flag more links to be removed or they’ll get out of penalty – after which Rap Genius will start appearing for the BRAND term again and other results once the Google Algorithms trust the site again. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all& http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?_r=... [2] http://searchengineland.com/google-says-no-comment-on-why-interflora-was-penalized-149308 http://searchengineland.com/google-says-no-comment-on-why-in... [3] http://news.rapgenius.com/Rap-genius-founders-open-letter-to-google-about-rap-genius-seo-lyrics http://news.rapgenius.com/Rap-genius-founders-open-letter-to...
- timtamboy63 13y agoMight be fair, but their argument about all their competitors doing this is completely valid. If Google's going to penalize RapGenius, they should penalize the other lyrics websites as well.
- citizens 13y agoCurrent rankings: #42 (was #1) - justin bieber memphis lyrics #43 (was #1) - justin bieber all bad lyrics #44 (was #2) - justin bieber hold tight lyrics #45 (was #1) - justin bieber one life lyrics #46 (was #4) - justin bieber bad day lyrics #48 (was #7) - justin bieber lyrics #54 (was #3) - justin bieber change me lyrics #59 (was #2) - justin bieber pyd lyrics #60 (was #1) - justin bieber confident lyrics #63 (was #1) - justin bieber heartbreaker lyrics #64 (was #5) - justin bieber roller coaster lyrics #68 (was #2) - justin bieber all that matters lyrics #68 (was #3) - justin bieber recovery lyrics #50 - rap genius source: serpscan.com
- rplnt 13y agoCan I ask why Justin Bieber in all the examples? Was this site somehow bieber-focused or bieber-promoted? I've never heard of it before this actually. edit: Followed links to past stories and got my answer here http://jmarbach.com/rapgenius-growth-hack-exposed http://jmarbach.com/rapgenius-growth-hack-exposed
- badman_ting 13y agoEnd result: now we have to use those regular, shitty lyrics sites again, or dig through the results. Mmmmm, so much better. You can't even get there by specifying rap genius in your query! This blows.
- techaddict009 13y agoWell Google does takes manual actions against link schemes. Google had taken action against its on Chrome browser in 2012. http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pagerank-reduced-due-to-sponsored-posts-106551 http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pag... check out for more info.
- arikrak 13y agoOffering money or return-links for links is shady, but it's not inherently illegal or anything.[1] Google doesn't own the internet. I wonder if it's a worthwhile risk. While there are some high-profile busts, in general most sites probably don't get caught. Though it's probably harder to do effectively since Google improved their algorithms. In the flower case [2], Google claimed the links hadn't helped the sites. Though Google couldn't have penalized all the Flower companies, since that would have made their results much worse. [1] If you're paying someone to link to you, that needs to be disclosed, but that doesn't mean the link needs to be nofollow. Though I guess following that rule would make it very easy to be caught. [2] http://searchengineland.com/ny-times-covers-paid-link-schemes-first-j-c-penney-now-flowers-industry-76340 http://searchengineland.com/ny-times-covers-paid-link-scheme...
- brentm 13y agoThere is something very important going on here. The reality is most search results are gamed & Google knows it. Everyone should be afraid of this happening to them. Clearly what RapGenius did was wrong, very stupid and extremely short sighted. However, you're still going to find a good percentage of your search results today from rankings achieved with equally as shady strategies. Google is too big & too powerful to play these kind of games and arbitrarily decide who gets penalized and who doesn't. Dare I say it but part of me feels like there is not enough bureaucracy in large penalty decisions considering their impact. There are literally millions of other sites doing the same thing and happily continuing their day.
- arrrg 13y agoRight in the middle of my yearly Christmas music shopping spree! I’m already not finding the lyrics I want to find. Since what they do have to offer is about a million times better than any other lyrics site I’m pretty sure they will weather this. I mean, they have to. Their service is pretty excellent, I’m not even sure why there way any need to fuck around with Google.
- themgt 13y agoMy favorite part of this is in the original blog post exposing the scheme, mahbodmoghadam, RapGenius co-founder/dude-bro in chief, immediately commented and said "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!" Like scoring an own goal, doing a victory dance, and then sprinting back out to score another. Just amazing. I wish I could find a violin tiny enough to appropriately express my sympathy for these clowns. http://jmarbach.com/rapgenius-growth-hack-exposed http://jmarbach.com/rapgenius-growth-hack-exposed
- EGreg 13y agoOpportunity to make the next big song annotation site before New Year's? Seriously how hard could it be ... write a Node.js app that can handle 10k clients on one machine, and partition the data by the song being annotated. Don't even need $1 million dollars. YouTube hosts the videos, anyway. Ah, but there is just one problem... song lyrics are copyrighted and a license to some database is like $20,000 Wish I knew a way around that.
- EGreg 13y agoCan I use the wiki api or scrape this: http://lyrics.wikia.com/Lyrics_Wiki http://lyrics.wikia.com/Lyrics_Wiki
- quahada 13y agoThe challenge is not technical. The challenge is community. RapGenius is a network effects driven site, so it's utility is driven by how many people use the site. Technology is table-stakes, but branding and marketing matter much more at this point. RapGenius grew because their user experience was much better than their competition. This was the foundation for their branding & marketing. Their growth will be sustained by their content and (once these penalties are phased out) by users' ability to discover their unique content. The technology is merely an enabler for the community-generated content. New competitors must find ways around the community's cold-start problem. Edit: typos
- MitziMoto 13y agoI agree that Rap Genius should have been penalized here, but so should literally every other lyrics site on the net. I've done SEO in hyper competitive spaces in the past and honestly, the system is broken. Google and Cutts love to preach this "Create value and quality content and you'll rank high" bullocks but it doesn't work like that. When you have a high number of well funded competitors who are all playing dirty, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY to compete with them with white hat tactics. You either play hardball yourself and risk a ban or you play nice and get creamed in the SERPs. It's really a rock | hard place situation in some niches. Oh, and I just saw the founders made this statement: "We are working with Google right now to resolve this. They've been really great, helping us identify changes we need to make, even on Christmas. We’re working on it as fast as we can, and expect to be back on Google very soon." WHAT? What makes these guys so special that they actually get help from Google. I think that pisses me off more than anything. There are a ton of webmasters out there trying to do the right thing SEO wise who get banned or penalized but could never, ever, get personal help from Google. We don't even get the courtesy of knowing why we've been banned most of the time. (Although to be fair this has gotten much better in GWT).
- amandabertha 13y agoBeing a ycombinator startup is like being a Harvard student. It means that in a 100m sprint, you start at the 50m line while your competitors start at the start.
- johnward 13y agoIn some highly competitive spaces your competitors will spam links to your site which eventually leads to negative SEO. Which I don't think Google will admit exists but it happens.
- akshat 13y agoI don't understand how Rap Genius' hack was any worse than what Mixpanel does with its free plan. https://mixpanel.com/free/ https://mixpanel.com/free/ Here, they are bribing customers to link to their site? Would this not be illegal too?
- smirksirlot 13y agoMixpanel isn't completely dependent on SERPs. It is a different user acquisition/awareness tactic. Also, illegal isn't really the right term to use here.
- bjourne 13y agoNice catch. Since they are basically offering the same deal, reward for links, they must also be violating the same rule.
- suhail 13y agoIt's different: it's a recommendation of our product and it drives real clicks back to Mixpanel (excluding google). Powered by badges are extremely common and are more akin to an ad. The main difference is that Rapgenius' sole goal is to game Google, ours is not.
- pcooelt 13y agoit's actually not - Matt Cutts specifically made a video about these exact type of "widget" links a few months ago. He recommended that they be no-followed.
- akshat 13y agoThanks. The main reason I ask is because I would like to do something similar with my product. However, after this fiasco, was skeptical about it. If it is an ad, then it would definitely be safer to mark the link as nofollow as ads are not allowed to be links with SEO benefits.
- robryan 13y agoI don't understand how stat counter gets away with what they do. They offer stats similar to google analytics. They seem to get most of their ranking from including a link back to them with a random anchor text from a set of terms they want to rank for in the JavaScript block to install stats.
- chmartin 13y agoYou would think Google would be able to tell that a Justin Bieber link does not belong on an arbitrary twitter post
- notastartup 13y agosearching 2pac lyrics rap genius yields no rapgenius.com either. it shows all the competitor lyric sites but not rapgenius. I have mixed feelings about this. How long until we see a game of he-said-she-said? Of course, socially engineered link building aimed at gaming the SERP is against the interest of consumers and google. However, now that we can see a competitor get taken out from google SERP by pointing their attention to a malicious technique, we should see more stories like this. The problem I have with SERP is that while it's good at finding the most relevant site (still returns spammy sites so not perfect) most of the time, it's built around the advertisement model. It doesn't give you a snapshot of the cross section of the data you are looking at across all the domains out there so that you can't choose on your own which lyric is the most to your liking (it really doesn't matter because lyrics are same across different websites). So the question of who ranks first even though they have identical content shows some underlying inefficiencies caused by the Advertisement revenue model. The more there is, the more advertisement gets seen and clicked. I feel that the search engine space with selling our attention to advertisements only creates more waste by others trying to get a share of the revenue by jumping into a profitable niche by creating an identical or similar content (article spinning etc). In turn, more competition would create people to use more Adwords or other advertising platforms. The end result is that consumer ends up with untrustworthy websites with content in the back of their priorities. Content should be judged by comparing it with other websites that offer the same content with an overview listing all the different domains showing that content. While displaying such cross domain contents, it should not bring advertisement as an incentive model.
- ryeon 13y agoGoogle is seriously doing a disservice to its lyrics searching users by penalizing RG. RG offers (in my opinion) the best quality and the most information rich lyrics pages on the web, it doesn't compare to anything out there.
- jowiar 13y agoAs much as Rap Genius probably deserves it, this seems like it is treading dangerously close to Antitrust territory. Any lawyers on here?
- ilaksh 13y agoI'm not an expert in SEO but I bet 1/3 to 1/2 of the serious SEO organizations/individuals do the same thing or something very similar. "Its not cheating unless you get caught"
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pbreit 13y agoI'm confused and concerned by Google's policy. I make a product. If I send out product to blogger with a review request (which would, of course, include a link to my site), am I running afoul of the guidelines? I don't even care that much about the Google juice as I do the coverage.
- jhonovich 13y agoSimply asking someone to review your product is not an issue. Offering money to do so or offering to do things in exchange for the review (like promoting their site on social media or your site) is.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- snogglethorpe 13y agoMan, that's a crazily passive-aggressive article... the author dances around it, couching his dislike (and fear) in slippery and vague language, but the clear impression one is left with is that he feels Google is "the enemy"... ><
- malkia 13y agoThis is one of the things where there is no clear right or wrong.
- pcooelt 13y agoRap Genius was given a "manual action" aka a penalty applied by an actual human because of the public outing that happened over the past few days, and the attention gained specifically by Matt Cutts. Their overall link portfolio is not half as bad as their competition, however all this attention forced Google to take action being that they need to live up to their reputation as hard asses. Let's face it, the algorithm might not pick up on these bartered links because they are a drop in the bucket of their overall link portfolio. Really more than anything this is another PR stunt by Google's search quality team. They have been outing people on Twitter for the past month (backlinks.com I believe and another blackhat service) and want the general public to know that they mean business.
- aspensmonster 13y agoPeople are always gaming the search engines. Lyric websites are some of the absolute worst perpetrators of this. They care for absolutely nothing but ad impressions and their sites are a tortuous experience to behold. That being said, I'd still say it's a shame since for once, someone gaming the system actually had decent content to offer.
- mspeuleski 13y agoGoogle practices the exact same dirty tactics it punishes smaller websites for. Note how they have a lot of ads all over their pages? If small websites do that, they get punished. Also, note how Google steals content from wikipedia and posts it next to search results? If small sites do that they get punished. Lastly, google is the world's largest reseller of links, except their links are "ok", for some obscure reason....you can pay google a large sum of money and see your link on billions of pages worldwide via link ads. If you're not scared of google's double talk, blatant spying, abuse of monopolistic powers, then you either work for them or you are completely alienated.
- kyle128 13y agoLet's not forget anyone that pays google in some way (adwords) bounces back from this almost immediately. Aka 6 months or less. Have known people only spending 10k per month that bounced back from penalization in 2-3 months.
- kyle128 13y agoLet's not forget anyone that pays google in some way (adwords) bounces back from this almost immediately. Aka 6 months or less. Have known people only spending 10k per month that bounced back from penalization in 2-3 months.
- DannoHung 13y agoIf RapGenius is smart, they'll turn this into beef and get front page coverage on a bunch of newspapers and websites.
- cromwellian 13y agoI never heard of rapgenius before this, or never noticed what lyric site I was on since I treat lyric lookups almost like dictionary lookups. As a result of this story, I now have heard of RG. So ironically, any press is good press, and despite the banning, and the public shaming in the media, it may very well be the equivalent of millions of dollars in free brand awareness.
- joelrunyon 13y ago> Finally, it’s probably an incredibly dumb business model to be doing a lyrics site that hopes for Google traffic in a time when Google, like Bing, is moving toward providing direct answers. Lyrics, to my understanding, often have to be licensed. That makes them a candidate for Google to license directly and provide as direct answers. Controversy aside - This seemed like the most interesting part of the write-up to me.
- easy_rider 13y agoCouldn't resist http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/500x/44344545.jpg http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/500x/44344545.jpg
- johnward 13y agoThe funny thing about this is that rap genius is the most user friendly site and it should be out ranking all of the other spam lyric sites.
- smackfu 13y agoWhat's really amusing is that after the penalty, most searches that include "rap genius" now have this result on the first page: How Rap Genius Won the SEO Game http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/5812335/how-rap-genius-won-the-seo-game http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/5812335/how-rap-geniu...
- greatsuccess 13y agoHow is what Rap Genius any different than selling ad space, Googles core business? It seems to be that this was just an interpersonal request for an AD to link back to Rap Genius. What is wrong with that anyway? Adwords and Adsense are just an affiliate program anyway. I dont see much of a problem with it.
- badapple 13y agowhat about others that are doing the same thing. for example TINT tintup.com once you create a free account they have the following: Dear valued Tint customer, Would you like to write a review about Tint? In exchange for your opinions/blog post, we are giving away 50% off FOREVER promo code for our Plus Plan. To learn more, click the button below: screen shot: http://imgur.com/wDnAJ4c http://imgur.com/wDnAJ4c
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