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Whilst 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
Whilst 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...
> The only reason it isn't fair is that the site disappears from Google for the BRAND term e.g. [rap genius].
So if instead of being rapgenius.com, they had shelled out big bucks for the domain lyrics.com, they would continue to rank for searches for "lyrics"? Our would someone at Google make a subjective decision about what terms are unique enough to their brand for them to not be penalized for?
Either of these seem much less fair to me than the status quo that all spammers get penalized for all search terms.
In that example they should still rank for "lyrics.com" which would be the BRAND term.
Google actually have done an EMD update to devalue sites trying to rank for generics using a generic domain.
As you can see using Google Adword Keyword Planner[1] for all locations in English the average searches are:
Lyrics - 1.2M avg. searches/month
Lyrics.com - 110k avg. searches/month
[1] https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/ https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/
I think that it would make sense to allow direct queries for the trademark, e.g., "rapgenius" in the case of rapgenius. In your example "lyrics" would certainly not be trademarkable, so I would imagine "lyrics.com" or similar would be used instead.
You seem to have a lot of experience with this kind of stuff.
Could you possibly give me a tldr on this story?
I recall the exposé talking about how they were trading twitter links for keyword link building. Yet I'm having a hard time working up the requisite outrage.
It's not spam - the people linking back aren't being coerced (i.e. spam comments), and the content it's being linked from is legit (i.e. not a crappy link-farm site void of content).
Is the reason that this is Bad(tm) because the link back is not "organic"? It strikes me as being identical to say, paying every a thousand bloggers writing about Bieber to link to RG - except that last example is impossible to detect. They exchanged a small ad for twitter inbound traffic.
Is there just a blanket ban on trying to divine how the algorithm works? It's a commonly accepted practice to pay other people to promote or write about your product/service/brand.
"The only reason it isn't fair is that the site disappears from Google for the BRAND term e.g. [rap genius]."
How is that not fair? They were caught attempting to cheat google. Not only that, but cheat their competitors and us (the users). In most scenarios (criminal, sports, academic), being caught means it's game over. And that's exactly what happened here.
When you get caught stealing from a cash register or breaking into a house, they don't just make you put the stuff back and send you on your way. When you caught cheating in professional sports, you forfeit the entire game; in higher academia, kicked out of school.
If anything, I think google is too soft on people attempting to cheat them. When it's obvious and blatant, they need to lay down the law so hard that people won't even consider it next time. This will make the user experience better for everyone. A slap on the wrist tells people the risk is worth it and that means we will be served up potentially worse (less organic) search results.
How is that not fair?
"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."
If anything, I think google is too soft on people attempting to cheat them.
Google's Search Quality Team are actually pretty strict in terms of reviewing the reconsideration request and if the site has previously had a penalty they pay extra attention to the cleanup.
Google 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.
Criminal, sports, and academic concerns are all governed by bodies that impose those sanctions. When Google imposes a sanction they are the judge, jury, and executioner.
Since Google offers a public service and is owned by public shareholders, this poses somewhat of a problem....especially when you consider their marketshare and whether or not such sanctions offers them a competitive advantage.
> Criminal, sports, and academic concerns are all governed by bodies that impose those sanctions. When Google imposes a sanction they are the judge, jury, and executioner.
Actually, in all of those cases, the judge and executioner (and, usually, the legislature making the rules) are all employees of the same organization. In some cases there is a separate jury as a finder of fact (e.g., in criminal cases in the US and countries similar legal systems), though in sports and academic cases there may well not be, depending on the particular rules of the particular organization.
Since when does the NCAA act as anything other than the judge, jury, and executioner?
There certainly is good SEO. Good SEO is often indistinguishable from good accessibility, good marketing, good design, good conversion optimization, good information theory, good metrics.
You use sites because they used good SEO. You can find StackOverflow posts ranking at one, because they used the good SEO that the good content deserved.
Anyone with an internet business taking your comment at face value will find herself ranking not in the top 20, no matter how good their content.
Good SEO has worth, has value. Even Matt Cutts promotes good SEO and sees the worth. Without SEO analytics you are sailing blind. Without knowledge of how to interpret them. Without knowledge of the guidelines you get gaffs like these.
There is good SEO and there is vandalization. Rap Genius vandalized their rankings.
No industry needs to die. If it needs to, explain why.
Optimize your site for all users, not just search engines.
If you stay in this naive view of SEO you will never have a successful internet business in many niches. What is sad is that some developers and designers can not deliver a website that is SEO optimized, so a business owner has to pay double to get an SEO to fix all on-page accessibility issues.
This penalty is entirely the result of that blogpost and the PR it generated. I am willing to bet that Google already discovered many of these links, through spam reports, through manual spam fighters and through algorithmic detection. This PR, and the open letter, forced Google's hand. Of course they have to visibly act on it. Of course they are well aware that that niche has some scummy shady practices, and Rap Genius is not the only one. Of course they have a better internal tool than OSE and can check link profiles and detect networks in a manner of minutes.
Besides, you can be a great SEO and never do a single link-building campaign. There is tremendous value in simply finding new content and articles to rank for and drive traffic. I loath black hat SEO, not for the unfair temporary advantage it gives, but because it creates posts like yours. Because it burns companies that are now much more careful to hire good SEO's. Because I know that good SEO helps people access relevant content.
Like e-mail spam, search engine spam will die. SEO's will be retrained to create websites that are accessible, user friendly, give content that is relevant to the search query.
Just read: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...
And try to find a single practice in there that is either manipulative, entirely done to service search engines alone, or hampers accessibility and user friendliness.
Good SEO builds authority. Creates quality mark-up. Makes descriptive website titles. Implements breadcrumbs and a sane website hierarchy. Rids the index of duplicates. Drives more users to your sites. Makes sure that blind people can access your content, like images or video. Makes sites load faster. Makes content more trustworthy etc. Good SEO needs no manipulation. There is a lot to gain by simply aligning yourself with Google's vision.
Please reconsider your tone, or realize you do not add anything of value to the debate, or to the many online business owners on HN. Can you imagine raising funds for an online startup and then have your post be the slide for "online marketing"?