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Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

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Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#91

Post by randallsquared »

goldenkey wrote: post #40
JohnTHaller wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, you don't understand what censorship is. Second, RapGenius cheated the system. They knew they were cheating the system. They violated the public guidelines that tell you not to cheat the system. And now they are paying the price. Why is that so difficult to grasp?

In addition, they had no furtiveness; it appeared they thought this was something that required no concealment. I'm guessing they don't have a media relations employee, because any decent quality control would have said direct emails from @rapgenius to random folk about a seedy scheme aren't the best idea. At least a proxy should have been used.. Their emails were wanton risk, the wording had no stealth; they got wha…

> it appeared they thought this was something that required no concealment.

Exactly so. It seems they were doing it in the open because they didn't understand that anyone would object.

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#92

Post by JohnTHaller »

deletes wrote: post #85
JohnTHaller wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quite a few reasons: http://portableapps.com/about/what_is_a_portable_app#whypaf

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#93

Post by deletes »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #92
deletes wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quite a few reasons: http://portableapps.com/about/what_is_a_portable_app#whypaf

There are sound arguments towards it. But Better Upgrading scares me.

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#94

Post by dkuntz2 »

spindritf wrote: post #87
dkuntz2 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is their ranking method broke? Most searches you make probably give you what you want within the top five results (excluding lyrics, as you've shown a weird need to have RapGenius be the source of your lyrics).

How can you prove RapGenius is the "best result"? Especially considering that courts have ruled that ranking algorithms are just opinions. You can be of the opinion that RapGenius is better, but that's your opinion. Multiple people can also be of the same opinion, which is a huge factor involved in Google's ranking algorithm. Another huge factor involved in their ranking algorithm is dissuading blackhat SEO techniques, which can make it appear like lots of people are of the opinion something is good.

So, again, while you are of the opinion RapGenius is the best lyrics site, I'm not, even before all this brouhaha started I didn't really like their site, especially the annotations, which to me seemed like a bunch of bored English majors who didn't really have any insights on the annotations they were making, but wanted you to think they were really smart. I also don't listen to rap music, which might also affect my view on the annotations.

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#95

Post by poopsintub »

ceejayoz wrote: post #38
adamnemecek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe name and domain change?

That puts them at PR0, too.

PR0 would be far better than what they have now. I think they consider it a negative 0 or maybe a negative 1. They could buy an aged domain pretty cheaply. It all depends on what they want to change their brand name to.

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#96

Post by clarky07 »

It seems somewhat unreasonable to manually penalize a website like this. If you can't figure it out algorithmically then it can't be that bad. Major companies (much bigger than Rap Genius) buy links all the time. How do I know? They have asked me for them. I used to run a financial blog and I know a certain company that bought links from pretty much every personal finance blog that would sell one to them, and I know this for a fact because I was in a network of blogs and talked about this on forums as a way to make money. I also have the emails to prove it.

Why doesn't this company get penalized? I have no idea. I guess nobody decided to write a blog post about it, it didn't get picked up on Hacker News, and Matt Cutts hasn't noticed it yet. Seems like if this is possible there should be a reverse black hat market springing up soon. Do some really bad black hat SEO for your competitors and then get them killed by Google.

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#97

Post by mtrimpe »

rickhanlonii wrote: post #62
obituary_latte wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less execution and more suicide isn't it?

Exactly. I know the scene here feels bad for RapGenius because they're putting themselves in their shoes and appreciating how devastating a penalty this is. But I don't feel bad for them whatsoever, and neither should anyone else. This is a penalty that they deserve. They took a risk and they lost. They knew what they were doing and the potential destruction of their traffic, and they did it anyway. You don't get les…

Good thing they also cracked down on Expedia after that disgruntled black-hat SEO outed some of his colleagues working for Expedia. /s

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#98

Post by captainmuon »

spindritf wrote: post #73

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…

Google is resting on their laurels. I'm convinced their actual algorithm hasn't changed much in the last few years, despite announcements claiming otherwise.

They changed the handling of search queries (searches are interpreted much less literally than a few years ago). They changed the way that pages are indexed, and changed the intervals to be smarter (faster for news sites, slower for sites that don't change). They now even "render" the pages partially to account for CSS and JS. They have smart stemming and synonym algorithms when building the indexes. But the actual algorithm - "PageRank" and the parts surrounding it - hasn't changed much I think, except for some parameter tuning.

Instead, they probably have a pile of semi-automatic "filters" to deal with spam and blackhat SEO. Engineers write a filter in code, test it against a test index, and then it goes into the new index version. I believe they are going more and more into manual intervention, and that they can now directly penalize/push sites without going down to the indexing level.

I can't prove it right now, but I'm pretty sure that the first SERP for popular search terms is actually manually curated, with the really organic links coming later. (I'm still trying to figure out a test methodology to analyse it :-).)

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#99

Post by poopsintub »

captainmuon wrote: post #48
jmduke wrote: post #12

Hypothetical question: if we ("we" being nebulous) were to unveil that every other major lyrics site (azlyrics, metrolyrics, stlyrics, lyricsfreak, lyrics365, etc. etc.) uses the same SEO tactics, would they receive the same attention and punishment?

Someone should just do blackhat SEO for a bunch of those sites, and then Google would have to punish them too (because who could proove that they didn't do it themselves?) Or taking it one step further, use these tactics to promote a controversial institution or politician (without them knowing). Then "leak" it to Google, so they get punished. Then claim Google is censoring them. Finally enjoy the outrage :-)

Domain and page authority weigh in on how much you can get away with link tactics imo. Sites that have been around for a few more years would likely withstand any blackhat tactics a third-party would shoot at them.

Re: Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90%

#100

Post by dkuntz2 »

Greenisus wrote: post #27

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. 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…

Is the Bing result really "better"? Lots of people would rather not have the annotations...

Additionally, with AdBlock on, AZLyrics makes only 21 requests and takes 1.03 seconds to load completely on my machine. RapGenius (still with AdBlock on) takes 27 seconds to load, with 208 requests. Based solely on that I'd rather use AZLyrics than RapGenius.

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