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Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

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Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#82

To 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 'lyri…

They didn't really push AZLyrics, or any other lyrics site up. Those rankings haven't changed. Their position relative in the list you see based on your search terms has, but that's relative.

Why should Google give special dispensation to RapGenius? Why should putting in something like "lyrics" or related content to someone being penalized get them to show up higher in the results?

Why should Google be RapGenius' search engine? Why shouldn't RapGenius make their search better?

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the act of being evil. Let's get some perspective here. They were offering to promote people's pages in return for them linking back to them. Far from being evil, this isn't even illegal .

So? Only one thing matters: They broke the TOS and Google rightfully enforced it.

The point isn't that Google was wrong in doing so, at least not in the thread you're responding to. The point was that violating a TOS is not "evil"- no one died, no one was tortured or raped, there weren't death camps or civil liberties being violated.

This was stupid, it wasn't evil.

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#84
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTTP 301 ?

A penalized site is unlikely to be allowed to pass on its PR.

Right. But the inbound links can still get to the new site. What I got from your comment was concern for other websites who linked to RapGenius, and the users of those websites...

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people would kill to have a site with millions and millions of uniques. If monetization HAD to be the primary focus, they could make money. Growth and product is the top priority. Unfortunately for them one of those is suffering right now.

A site with millions of uniques doesn't = revenue. Nor does it equal success, interest from investors, etc. Source: running a ~2m unique site right now.

I have used your site quite often and was wondering why did you decide to make the downloaded program be wrapped with your executable? Why not just have a .rar/.zip of the actual program.

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#86
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adwords spend is completely unrelated to search ranking.

If you're a company and you get to the #1 spot organically you can stop buying AdWords clicks for the same keywords.

Actually, adwords can be very profitable when you have a #1 organic ranking.

http://searchengineland.com/google-research-even-if-you-rank...

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#87
post #82

To 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 'lyri…

They didn't really push AZLyrics, or any other lyrics site up. Those rankings haven't changed. Their position relative in the list you see based on your search terms has, but that's relative . Why should Google give special dispensation to RapGenius? Why should putting in something like "lyrics" or related content to someone being penalized get them to show up higher in the results? Why should Google be RapGenius' se…

RapGenius should have a better search. And Google shouldn't give special dispensation to RapGenius, it should return best possible results.

Which they don't after excluding RapGenius. They purposefully broke their search results to protect their broken ranking method.

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#88
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A penalized site is unlikely to be allowed to pass on its PR.

Right. But the inbound links can still get to the new site. What I got from your comment was concern for other websites who linked to RapGenius, and the users of those websites...

Well, 301ing them is probably going to apply the penalty to the new brand, making the technique useless for getting back in search results. Not 301ing them means you're starting out with PR0 all over again, in which case you might as well just wait out the penalty period. In either situation, the rebrand on a new domain solution sucks.

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#89

To 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 'lyri…

What are you going on about? I don't think you have the slightest idea about how Google's ranking algorithm, or for that matter any ranking algorithm, actually works.

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#90

SEO is such a fickle beast. To everyone here who's saying they brought this upon themselves, when rules are unenforced and all your competition breaks them, you've already hamstrung yourself if you don't break them too. If everyone in the MLB is juicing and a rookie gets caught, you don't say "what an idiot", you look at either 1) enforcing the rules on everyone and broadly changing the culture or 2) question whether…

No. They broke the terms of service. They got banned. End of story.

meta-note: this is a great real-world example of the Lawful vs. Chaotic arguments.
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