Rap Genius is Back on Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#51

Post by tinco » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 3:37 PM UTC

ashray wrote: post #49

tinco wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I understand your concerns, this is just how the world works. If you know the president of the United States personally, there's a good chance he might spend a little of his good will smoothing out some bureaucratic processes for you. Nothing illegal or abusive, just the president asking official this-and-that why process so-and-so is taking so long for your company. It's not a question of having to do the s…

Okay, I see why you were not able to follow the problem. >> stupid mistake like Rap Genius did your site might be off Google for a month or two, possibly destroying your business. Sometimes businesses get wrongly blacklisted. Yes, it happens. They do get destroyed because of this, people do lose homes and jobs over this. But this isn't because Google takes a month or two to sort this kind of thing out (a month or two…

Alright, I fully agree :)

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#52

Post by adidash » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 3:39 PM UTC

ashray wrote: post #29

Soviet wrote: post #2

I wonder how long it would take for any other website without 15 mln backing and direct line to Google to return.

As someone who knows folks who got wrongly blacklisted.. Well, you pretty much never get back. No matter what you do. You're lucky if you get a decent reply from customer support to begin with.. Your best bet is to change domains, fill in a redirect and try to build up backlinks again. It'll take a year or two and hopefully no competitor pops up in your space. Or, you can try and get Andreesen-Horowitz interested in…

I have helped sites with over 2 million backlinks and got them out of manual penalty in under 3 months in very competitive verticals like travel & finance.

It entirely depends upon the scope of penalty. Unless you are completely deindexed from Google search results, you can always recover from a penalty.

Feel free to email me if you have any specific need.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#53

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 3:44 PM UTC

holyjaw wrote: post #37

OoTheNigerian wrote: post #32

I do not understand why people are offended that they came back quickly AFTER doing a bit of penance. Should their investors not have made calls? However, it should be noted that they did their part. One of my favorite quotes is this: "To save a drowning man, he must first give you his hand" If the Rap Genius guys were incompetent and did not do their part in removing the links so quickly (see main story for technica…

Just to hijack on one of your points: "it also helped that people really found Rap Genius useful." This is painfully true, and I know it has been discussed in prior discussions. Rap Genius is without a doubt THE BEST lyrics site available, hands down. Even if the other sites weren't ad-ridden scammy buggy shitty websites, if they got their acts together and actually TRIED, Rap Genius would still be top dog. I don't c…

[deleted]

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#54

Post by virtualwhys » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 3:46 PM UTC

Complete and utter bullshit.

That they blatantly employed blackhat SEO techniques and are back on Google within a matter of days is sickening.

Think of all the sites that are penalized in various ways for similarly shady SEO practices and have to spend _months_ to regain their previous position.

Hopefully Bing et al can capture some marketshare and bring some degree of neutrality to the search engine landscape (i.e. not have every website owner on the planet beholden to the beast).

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#55

Post by danso » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 3:50 PM UTC

The "technical digression" with Github code on how to do a mass scrape is cool, though not surprising (er...how else would you accomplish such a big data task...though I'm glad I'm not the only one who uses Typhoeus, a great but underused gem).

But what's surprising to me is that a company that knows how to automate things and work with data...why the f--- were they manually soliciting bloggers to post links? That seems seriously inefficient and comically backwards...as if Sergey Brin spent his early Google days modifying SERPs by editing and uploading Excel spreadsheets to the server.

It seems seriously inefficient to me because at this point, Rap Genius has a lot of traffic and a lot of linkage already. So did the few backlinks, per day, that RapGenius got, through lame blogmasters who would participate in such a thing...really have an effect on their SEO rank, i.e. is it so easy to still game Google?

Or, was RG just doing it because they thought it would have a worthwhile effect (keep in mind that this is one of their co-founders who was individually emailing people), i.e. RG was being naively optimistic?

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#56

Post by jstalin » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 3:59 PM UTC

Is it a sign of getting older when black background web sites get harder and harder to look at for longer periods of time?

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#57

Post by knapp » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 4:00 PM UTC

LukeB_UK wrote: post #4

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?

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-scr...

This one is particularly weird / egregious:

http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Engineering-genius-understanding...

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#58

Post by nemesisj » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 4:02 PM UTC

grimlck wrote: post #39

OoTheNigerian wrote: post #32

I do not understand why people are offended that they came back quickly AFTER doing a bit of penance. Should their investors not have made calls? However, it should be noted that they did their part. One of my favorite quotes is this: "To save a drowning man, he must first give you his hand" If the Rap Genius guys were incompetent and did not do their part in removing the links so quickly (see main story for technica…

Because it is a double standard. There are thousands of sites which get blacklisted by Google. I'm sure all of them fix their errors really quickly once they realize they are on the black list. And none of them get back on Google nearly as quickly as rap genius did. If Google applied these rules consistently with all websites, I would have no problem with it, but they don't. This breaks the myth that Silicon Valley i…

Exactly. Everything about how Google handled this is wrong, in my opinion. I couldn't care less about RapGenius - they're just a symptom of the underlying problem which is we don't have any real competition in the search engine market, and we're paying for it with unfair antics like this. Longer thoughts here: http://peebs.org/2014/01/04/we-need-viable-search-engine-com...

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#59

Post by adidash » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 4:07 PM UTC

grimlck wrote: post #39

OoTheNigerian wrote: post #32

I do not understand why people are offended that they came back quickly AFTER doing a bit of penance. Should their investors not have made calls? However, it should be noted that they did their part. One of my favorite quotes is this: "To save a drowning man, he must first give you his hand" If the Rap Genius guys were incompetent and did not do their part in removing the links so quickly (see main story for technica…

Because it is a double standard. There are thousands of sites which get blacklisted by Google. I'm sure all of them fix their errors really quickly once they realize they are on the black list. And none of them get back on Google nearly as quickly as rap genius did. If Google applied these rules consistently with all websites, I would have no problem with it, but they don't. This breaks the myth that Silicon Valley i…

You will be surprised by the amount of time people take to work seriously on fixing their penalty.

I have helped over 40 websites recover from Google penalty in the last 7-8 months. 80% of the websites seek help only after they have screwed up atleast one reconsideration request without taking the necessary steps.

Google typically responds to penalty reconsideration requests within a week, often less than a week. So if you have taken the right action and have submitted a really solid reconsideration request, its totally possible to get out of a penalty in under 2 weeks. Also, the backlink count was under 200K which is a reasonably manageable.

Rap Genius could have saved some time using tools like scrapebox to perform some of the scraping activities. But thats another story.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#60

Post by kenjackson » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 4:08 PM UTC

tszming wrote: post #36

People should worry why Google has so much power nowadays, rather than why they unban Rap Genius so fast.

This really is the thing that struck me. All this talk about companies being destroyed and jobs lost and hardly a mention of worry about the power Google yields.

We need more competition in this space. Sites need a search engine with real market share to compete against Google.