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They have the word 'lyrics' at the end of the slug for that post and a number of others which don't have any relevance to lyrics. Surely that's still bad SEO pr

They have the word 'lyrics' at the end of the slug for that post and a number of others which don't have any relevance to lyrics. Surely that's still bad SEO practice?

jarnix 13y ago
Like lyrics of Franz Kafka, did not notice before reading your post. http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Franz-kafka-le-nouvel-avocat-lyrics http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Franz-kafka-le-nouvel-avocat-lyr...
MattBearman 13y ago
Well spotted, it looks like all of their news article URLs end in '-lyrics', even those when it's not even slightly relevant eg: http://news.rapgenius.com/Snapchat-find-friends-abuse-lyrics http://news.rapgenius.com/Snapchat-find-friends-abuse-lyrics More shady SEO practices from Rap Genius, disappointed but not surprised.
dmn757 13y ago
Very observant... I wonder what Google would say about this. I would almost find this more egregious than their original offense due to the posts having nothing to do with lyrics.
knapp 13y ago
All of the links in the poetry section I can see have "lyrics" appended to the URL. And some of those are not even poems: http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Herman-melville-bartleby-the-scrivener-a-story-of-wall-street-lyrics http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Herman-melville-bartleby-the-scr... This one is particularly weird / egregious: http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Engineering-genius-understanding-gears-with-lego-lyrics http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Engineering-genius-understanding...
elwell 13y ago
Not really bad SEO practice, just inflexible software.
tomlemon 13y ago
Tom Lehman here (Rap Genius co-founder) The fact that all our text and song page URLs end in "-lyrics" is a relic of a time when we hosted almost exclusively lyrics. Making the changes required to host all kinds of annotated texts has been a big project and making the URLs make sense is something we haven't gotten around to. The reason it's not a totally trivial change is that both users and texts share the same top-level namespaces, and so right now we use the "-lyrics" suffix to differentiate song and text pages from user profile pages. We want to change the suffix to "-annotated" for non-music pages and will hopefully get around to in the next few weeks. To our knowledge the existing situation doesn't help with SEO (no one is searching "bartleby the scrivener lyrics"), and it's confusing, so we 100% agree that the current situation is bad. For more info on the "Worse is Better" philosophy that caused the current jank situation to persist for so long, see this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X45YY97FmL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X45YY97FmL4

They have the word 'lyrics' at the end of the slug for that post and a number of others which don't have any relevance to lyrics. Surely that's still bad SEO practice?

jarnix 13y ago

Like lyrics of Franz Kafka, did not notice before reading your post. http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Franz-kafka-le-nouvel-avocat-lyrics http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Franz-kafka-le-nouvel-avocat-lyr...

MattBearman 13y ago

Well spotted, it looks like all of their news article URLs end in '-lyrics', even those when it's not even slightly relevant eg: http://news.rapgenius.com/Snapchat-find-friends-abuse-lyrics http://news.rapgenius.com/Snapchat-find-friends-abuse-lyrics More shady SEO practices from Rap Genius, disappointed but not surprised.

dmn757 13y ago

Very observant... I wonder what Google would say about this. I would almost find this more egregious than their original offense due to the posts having nothing to do with lyrics.

knapp 13y ago

All of the links in the poetry section I can see have "lyrics" appended to the URL. And some of those are not even poems: http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Herman-melville-bartleby-the-scrivener-a-story-of-wall-street-lyrics http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Herman-melville-bartleby-the-scr... This one is particularly weird / egregious: http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Engineering-genius-understanding-gears-with-lego-lyrics http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Engineering-genius-understanding...

elwell 13y ago

Not really bad SEO practice, just inflexible software.

tomlemon 13y ago

Tom Lehman here (Rap Genius co-founder) The fact that all our text and song page URLs end in "-lyrics" is a relic of a time when we hosted almost exclusively lyrics. Making the changes required to host all kinds of annotated texts has been a big project and making the URLs make sense is something we haven't gotten around to. The reason it's not a totally trivial change is that both users and texts share the same top-level namespaces, and so right now we use the "-lyrics" suffix to differentiate song and text pages from user profile pages. We want to change the suffix to "-annotated" for non-music pages and will hopefully get around to in the next few weeks. To our knowledge the existing situation doesn't help with SEO (no one is searching "bartleby the scrivener lyrics"), and it's confusing, so we 100% agree that the current situation is bad. For more info on the "Worse is Better" philosophy that caused the current jank situation to persist for so long, see this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X45YY97FmL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X45YY97FmL4