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Rap Genius is Back on Google

news.rapgenius.com

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Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#91

Post by dhorowirtz »

http://m.entrepreneur.com/article/230631

But now, Rap Genius co-founder Ilan Zechory tells us the site has returned to Google's search results. "It takes a couple days for Google to re-index everything, so search results are a little wonky right now, but we are officially reinstated," Zechory said in an email.

Somewhat ironically, Zechory served as a project manager at Google for two years prior to founding Rap Genius in 2009.

>> Wow that is troubling. So site that gets banned gets unbanned quickly and founder just happens to be ex google project manager

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#92

Post by JohnTHaller »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #25

I've followed SEO on and off for years and I wouldn't have thought that their strategy of allowing people to generate and embed links back to the site was shady at all. I even recommended something similar a few years ago in good faith. They're useful, relevant, and it just seems like good marketing. These things will spread organically and drive traffic even if you remove the SEO benefits. Could you say that Scribd…

Allowing people to create links to your website isn't shady.

Paying people to link back to your website on high-value keywords like 'justin beiber lyrics' from blog posts on other sites to artificially inflate your pagerank is 100% blackhat SEO. The payment in this case was a Twitter post about the link provider's website.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#93

Post by mtrimpe »

blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #86
mtrimpe wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their rules are very clear and succinct. If I think of a lot of things my users would search for and try to create valuable information for them concerning those queries... is that valuable content or are those doorway pages? If I give when someone few months of my service for free when they write a nice article with a link to my site... is that good customer service or a link scheme? If I create a press release on…

> If I think of a a lot of things my users would search for and try to create valuable information for them concerning those queries... is that great content or are those doorway pages? Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it…

What's your point here? That you find these guidelines so specific that they don't leave any room for interpretation?

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#94

Post by ryguytilidie »

nemesisj wrote: post #58
grimlck wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Every single startup I've worked for, one of the objectives was to befriend Matt Cutts so you would have a quick line to getting stuff like this fixed. Seems like a reasonable amount of power to give one person/company...

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#95

Post by JohnTHaller »

Honestly, this is just saddening. Google needs to have a consistent policy towards these blackhat SEO offenders and enforce it for everyone. RapGenius bought backlinks to artificially inflate their pagerank. They knew they were cheating but they did it anyway. They got caught. And they were hit with a manual action on Google. Sounds good so far. But that's where it stops. RapGenius, using the connections they have from their multi-million dollars in VC funding, got back on Google and was able to avoid paying the price for their cheating.

Compare this to regular websites. Lots of smaller sites will end up paying a "whitehat SEO" firm to work on a "link strategy". These firms will claim up down and sideways that what they do is legal, ethical and follows Google's rules. But, what they actually do is either (1) create networks of fake sites to provide backlinks on certain terms to artificially boost the site, (2) place spam comments using bots on legitimate sites to do the same [not that this will thankfully no longer work well due to the latest Google algorithm update], or (3) pay legit sites to place backlinks to artificially transfer pagerank the same way that RapGenius did. Now, these other sites, when they get caught, they get a manual action or a smackdown. The difference? They have to actually pay the penalty. Arguing that they didn't know usually doesn't work. The penalty is LONG. They can't call on their VC firm to make calls at Google to give them a get out of jail free card.

I'd like to call on Google to create a public policy on how they handle these manual actions with some clearly defined penalties (example: 3 month manual action of 6 PR drop, etc) and to consistently enforce them across the board. That way a mom and pop site that pays a 'whitehat SEO firm' and gets caught doesn't have a worse time than a site like RapGenius that purposely engages in blackhat SEO who can use their VC connections to get out of having to pay a penalty in under 2 weeks. It's also sad that Google gave this get out of jail free card to a site whose entire business model is based around other people's copyrighted works which RapGenius doesn't have a license for, doesn't pay for, and publishes illegally.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#96

Post by McKittrick »

Its interesting that despite their founders outspokeness, the influx of heavy weight VC, tech press expose's on their offices, etc., RapGenius is really no more or no less than a standard, multi-multi-page SEO site, no different than the countless others just like it. No brand, no user affinity, no direct traffic to speak of. Just a bunch of drift net pages crawled by Google waiting to pick off unsuspecting search traffic. My favorite line of this post was the last: "Much love. iOS app dropping next week!" - unless you are searching that term in google, Im not sure who that is addressed to.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#97

Post by michaeldunworth »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #95

Honestly, this is just saddening. Google needs to have a consistent policy towards these blackhat SEO offenders and enforce it for everyone. RapGenius bought backlinks to artificially inflate their pagerank. They knew they were cheating but they did it anyway. They got caught. And they were hit with a manual action on Google. Sounds good so far. But that's where it stops. RapGenius, using the connections they have fr…

This.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#99

Post by [deleted] »

bushido wrote: post #66
res0nat0r wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2] How do you know this is the case? Matt Cutts said they've relisted them quickly because AH slipped Google some cash? Or maybe RapGenius followed their cleanup policy correctly and were relisted naturally after submitting like many other companies a reconsideration request. 3] How do you know this was a special case? Thousands of sites I'm sure re de/relisted every day that you don't hear about (because they aren't…

> How do you know this is the case? I don't. I also don't know if this is not the case. Do you? This uncertainty IS the reason for the current loss of faith. > Matt Cutts said they've relisted them quickly because AH slipped Google some cash? I never said cash exchanged hands. I doubt it did. Can you with a 100% surety say that a special favor of any kind did not occur? > Maybe RapGenius followed their cleanup policy…

[deleted]

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#100

Post by tomlemon »

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?

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

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