Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe name and domain change?
That puts them at PR0, too.
Well maybe PR0 is better than PR >0 with no possible growth.
Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%
71–80 of 120 posts
Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%
#72Ok, how can Rap Genius recover from this? They're one of the best (and least shady) lyrics sites on the net. They acted immorally, yes, but is justifiable to summarily execute their company? Google has a domineering position in the market, and it's a bit ironic that people were quick to call for Microsoft to be split into multiple companies about a decade ago, yet nobody bats an eye when Google exercises their power.…
I expect them to go back to right where they were once their penalty is lifted. Assuming most of their visits were google searchers clicking on the top link, nearly all of those visits/day will come back once they're the top link again. Remember that a huge majority of people have not heard about this controversy. The hacker news sort of community is not their primary audience. It's possible they'll be bigger, what w…
They may not be back at that top spot, though. It depends on how much of their ranking was organic and how much of it was due to the cheating.
Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%
#73To recap. Google's algorithm is terrible, and despite having more PhDs on board than my uni, can be played by anyone with two brain cells and a mildly popular Twitter account.
To rectify this, they crippled my search results by penalizing Rapgenius and instead pushing some AZlyrics junk that not only lacks annotations but is inaccurate.
Seems like an easy fix, for the end user at least, add a keyword search for 'lyrics' to go directly to Rapgenius, right? No. Here's a search for smoke on the water
http://rapgenius.com/search?q=smoke%20on%20the%20water
First result? Pro Era – Like Water. Second? Childish Gambino – I. The Worst Guys. Third? Smoke DZA – Diamond.
Arguably the most popular song in the history of rock and roll? Sixth.
Those are some of the smartest people on the planet. I'm not being sarcastic. How depressing.
Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%
#74It wasn't so genius to be expository to random people via email, about a link-back scam. Sorry RapDingus, it's over; maybe next go around you'll have less hubris and daringness in using unethical practices. http://jmarbach.com/rapgenius-growth-hack-exposed
If you think this isn't happening all the time, everywhere -- you're mistaken.
People rob and steal, does that make it acceptable for you to do it? People are racist, does that make it acceptable for you to do it? People don't give up seats for pregnant and old women, is it acceptable if you don't? Not everything is black and white, but this is. What I'm getting at sscalia is that the small minded way people like you think is something that's wrong with this society. Fix up.
Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%
#75Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. They broke the terms of service. They got banned. End of story.
What's it like seeing the world in black and white?
Not sure. I'm too busy seeing all the gray lines that would be created by Google giving preferential treatment to those deemed more "important" when they could have stayed black and white.
Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%
#77Not only is this bad for RapGenius, it's bad for Google, and most importantly bad for Google's users. Yes, RapGenius screwed up, and they've paid the price. But they've publicly recognized what they did and apologized. Google really should reinstate their ranking, because people searching for lyrics right now are being given the huge disservice of using the ultra-spammy lyrics sites from days of yore.
>it's bad for Google, and most importantly bad for Google's users BS. What's good for Google is showing people that if you engage in bad practices your shit will get nuked from orbit , even if your site is better than the competitors. You'd better believe that companies are going to avoid blackhat SEO in the future after this, and that's absolutely in Google's interests.
What's good for Google is doing what made them successful, providing the best search results. We now know one type of search they're no longer doing that for.
Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%
#78What should Google do in this situation? I fully understand them murdering Rap Genius in their indexes, but it also hurts Google since Rap Genius actually has the best content. First result for "jay-z holy grail lyrics" Google: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jayz/holygrail.html Bing: http://rapgenius.com/Jay-z-holy-grail-lyrics The Bing result is better (though both are valid). I would suspect that most sites pulling…
> What should Google do in this situation? I fully understand them murdering Rap Genius in their indexes, but it also hurts Google since Rap Genius actually has the best content.
It helps them in the long term, as it dissuades sites from using blackhat SEO if they know their company can suffer severely for it
Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%
#79Not only is this bad for RapGenius, it's bad for Google, and most importantly bad for Google's users. Yes, RapGenius screwed up, and they've paid the price. But they've publicly recognized what they did and apologized. Google really should reinstate their ranking, because people searching for lyrics right now are being given the huge disservice of using the ultra-spammy lyrics sites from days of yore.
> people searching for lyrics right now are being given the huge disservice of using the ultra-spammy lyrics sites from days of yore
AZLyrics is a lot more appealing to me. Much lighter weight.
Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%
#80It's pretty scary how much Google controls the internet. I wish Bing or Yahoo or DuckDuckGo weren't so much worse than Google, or I'd happily use them.
Give me just 20-30 million dollars, legal protection from any patent claims, and (providing my search engine works well technically) make it the default in a small percentage of all Firefox installs.
What I'm trying to say is, Google doesn't have the monopoly because they're the only ones who can build a good search engine. The have the monopoly because they do have good technology, but also because of path dependence, and because there is no political effort to build up a competitor.
I already posted a couple of days ago, there are a bunch of ways governments could support competitors when one search engine controls a large fraction of the market, say more than 2/3. For example a special monopoly tax, subsidies for competitors, etc.
One thing I think would be nice is to make search engines offer a free/very cheap API (as long as they have > XX % market share). Anybody can come along and build a Google + Bing + Pokemon-Wiki meta search engine. If you tune it to be profitable, you'll have a lot of competing search engine frontends spring up. But you'll also have a lot of search engine backends (and not just Bing, Google, and Yandex), because its suddenly profitable to build verticals (e.g. indexing just tech news or recipies), which require less resources technically - because the vertical backends get traffic through the competing frontends.
And I could choose a frontend that gives me Google-like searches, or one that interprets terms more literal (like when you use +"term" in Google), which would be great for programming related stuff. There could be another one focussing on social media, or local stuff, etc..