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Google penalty for Life? Any hope for reconsideration? Rap Genius next step?
Google's latest punishment for Rap Genius SEO (bad tactics) has been getting lot of attention in the tech news world. Everyone is discussing about the punishment and the bad tactics but it would be great if we could talk on this topic with a new perspective. Is Google's SEO penalty is for Life? Any hope left for Rap Genius (or any organisation affected for that matter) reconsideration? So what do you need to do when this happens to you? I think this topic is worthy of discussion.
- sp332 13y agoIt's not some deep mystery. They just need to stop doing the things listed in the Google webmaster guidelines https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356
- bushido 13y ago> Is Google's SEO penalty is for Life? No. It's very temporary, they'll may need to rely less on search engines to begin with. > Any hope left for reconsideration Is there hope? Yes, definitely. Should there be reconsideration? No. They did something wrong, as in known to be very very wrong for a very very long time. Reconsidering this for them opens the doors to other people who may or may not have deliberately done the same. I'd like my search results to be free of arbitrary human judgement. One reconsideration that I don't mind is if Google reverses the blacklisting of the terms "rapgenius" and "rap genius" but only once Google has figured out a alternate change to their algorithm to control such future behavior, while penalizing past transgressions. > Any hope left for Rap Genius? Sure, lots of it. This is really not that bad. Sure they lost 2/3 of their traffic overnight, but increasing traffic by 200% is not really a huge challenge on the web. They will just need to rebuild their traction the right way, not quite hard since they have a large existing community. > So what do you need to do when this happens to you? I mentioned this in a different comment[0], I personally know of a number of legitimate sites that were invariably affected due to content and blog farms harvesting their content when Google's panda algorithm rolled out. They did need to go over any other possibilities for getting flagged, we did find a couple of unintentional transgressions, for example one of the authors had been publishing rather short articles, which were more like blurbs of coherent thought, unique but very easy to get flagged under duplicate filters. We did not delete those articles but set strict minimum content length rules. Had to cut back on a few expenses while in recovery. In the grand scheme of things, panda was just a blip. Once fixed, the traffic grew exponentially. Lastly, I welcome these changes, as it gives newer sites and startups a fair chance to survive and grow. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6966454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6966454