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Rap Genius is Back on Google

news.rapgenius.com

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Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#111

Post by argonaut »

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…

I keep hearing people bandying about this "VC connection" baseless innuendo. How is that anything but baseless, cynical speculation?

Remember, we're talking about someone (Matt Cutts) who penalized Google's own Chome website for improper links. If there was ever a conflict of interest, that would be it.

The idea that Matt was doing RG a special favor through a16z or other investors is an extraordinary claim, and we're going to need more evidence than just gut feeling.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#112

Post by jonknee »

ryanmerket wrote: post #107
sheetjs wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is a business, and there is a very good chance that they financially benefit from Rap Genius being restored. Other companies that suffer don't have that financial link, and maybe the best course is for them to raise VC funds (and posture themselves so that Google stands to lose if they penalize) I agree with you in theory, but in practice it sounds like you expect google to act as if they care about things lik…

How much revenue do you think RapGenius brings Google? Even if it was $10M/qtr that is a drop in the bucket for Google.

RapGenius brings Google $0 in revenue. RapGenius brings in $0 in revenue for anyone--it's not monetized.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#113

Post by PavlovsCat »

holyjaw wrote: post #40
pstack wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone clarify for me, again, what is so special about Rap Genius? It's just a bunch of stupid rap lyrics. So what? In fact, how are they not being sued for copyright by the owners of all the lyrics they're posting, anyway? I run across Rap Genius now and then and have always considered it to be spam, just like yahoo answers, ehow, and mahalo pages.

Sorry to say, but your assessment of the site is 100% incorrect. It STARTED as a Rap Lyrics website, but it quickly expanded to be an ANY lyrics website (and they will probably expand beyond that) The main driving force behind it is that anyone can edit the lyrics, and even better, anyone can ANNOTATE the lyrics to explain what certain sections mean. Let's take for example the lyrics for Mumford & Sons' "The Cave": h…

> even better, anyone can ANNOTATE the lyrics to explain what certain sections mean.

Maybe I looked at the wrong lyrics, but I saw precious few explanations, instead most lines had jokes and/or totally unrelated pictures attached to them. Often enough the jokes is to simply restate what was said in rapper slang in plain english, which is funny for exactly the first time you read it, then it's just spam.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#114

Post by jonknee »

bushido wrote: post #8

This is great for Rap Genius. But this truly saddens me as well. I cannot for the life of me understand how they were able to fix ten-of-thousands of backlinks and other shady practices and get back in the good graces of Google so darn quickly. Frankly I do not know a single other legitimate(+with good traffic) site who was able to get back in the good graces of Google after algorithm updates without spending many ma…

> Frankly I do not know a single other legitimate(+with good traffic) site who was able to get back in the good graces of Google after algorithm updates without spending many many months researching any possible reasons to be penalized and fixing it themselves after repeatedly asking google for help to no avail.

Well there wasn't an algorithm update, there was a manual action. Google reversed the manual action after RapGenius stopped breaking the rules and cleaned up its mess. If this happened to you there would be a note about it in Webmaster Tools and you would be able to ask Google to take another look. I'm sure RapGenius had all hands on deck making sure they were up to snuff.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#115

Post by theodoracharl »

grimlck wrote: post #35

This really shows that even in Silicon Valley, your success is driven as much by the connections you have and the people you know, rather than pure talent and merit.

What it really shows is that Y-Combinator's original ambition to support hackers in hacking capitalism is over.

Successful startups, like mainstream corporations, are determined by

1. Public relations stunts, getting press, marketing bullshit

2. Connections, Privilege, Cronyism, Nepotism, Harvard, Yale, Stanford

Paul Graham sold out and is now just like every other capitalist. Exploiting privilege to get richer. ycombinator's biggest successes are marketing successes--their success is defined by PR and Cronyism.

This isn't Steve Wozniak--the tech genius--creating the Apple II. This is fat headed fratboys using PR stunts and cronies to rake in money by squeezing out the competition.

The rich will get richer. The children of the rich will get richer. PR darlings and frat douchebags will get richer. Hackers will be ignored by YCombinator--Hackers aren't as profitable.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#116

Post by buro9 »

Were the 178k URLs that they scraped on 178k unique domains or a very few domains?

The tool they wrote looks like it would have been a DoS attack if the latter were the case. There appears to be no thought or consideration for the sites they scraped that had linked to them, no attempt to read robots.txt and see whether they should fetch the pages.

What they did was wrong in the first place, but they could try and do things better in their attempt to repair things. Instead they continue to act in a way that externalises any cost to them and continues to treat their service as somehow privileged enough to deserve such breaks.

How many of the 53k failures to pull and scrape pages were to do with the fact that the servers in question were under a DoS attack by RapGenius?

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#117

Post by Shog9 »

walshemj wrote: post #14
bushido wrote: post #8

This is great for Rap Genius. But this truly saddens me as well. I cannot for the life of me understand how they were able to fix ten-of-thousands of backlinks and other shady practices and get back in the good graces of Google so darn quickly. Frankly I do not know a single other legitimate(+with good traffic) site who was able to get back in the good graces of Google after algorithm updates without spending many ma…

Having worked for large ftse100 publishers who had sites penalized in algo updates its stinks that such an avowedly black hat site gets of with a slap on the wrist.

This wasn't an algorithm update.

If the folks at Google can figure out how to detect this sort of gaming more reliably, that may end up in a future algorithm update, and no amount of pleading will matter for anyone affected by it - they'll have to fix the problem or continue to suffer the consequences.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#118

Post by friscobob »

argonaut wrote: post #110
friscobob wrote: post #77

God this pisses me off to no end. So my site is targeted by negative SEO. (Yeah, I know, I know, negative SEO doesn't exist. Fuck off.) So who do I call? I've been penalized for months and there is nothing I can do about it. Nobody can help. But these fuckers are able to make a call and recover from a SELF INFLICTED wound in less than a week. I am being targeted by crap that is COMPLETELY OUT OF MY CONTROL and it's t…

Disavow?

I've tried the disavow. Seen no indication that it had any effect.

There were 31 thousand new backlinks added on December 31st (Holy shit, I just noticed that. WTF!). Another 1300 added on the 1st of January. It's normally 100 or 200 a day. Not sure how I'm supposed to manage the disavow process when I get that many new spammy inbound links a day.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#119

Post by walshemj »

Shog9 wrote: post #117
walshemj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked for large ftse100 publishers who had sites penalized in algo updates its stinks that such an avowedly black hat site gets of with a slap on the wrist.

This wasn't an algorithm update. If the folks at Google can figure out how to detect this sort of gaming more reliably, that may end up in a future algorithm update, and no amount of pleading will matter for anyone affected by it - they'll have to fix the problem or continue to suffer the consequences.

The algo is meant to detect such manipulative links and devalue them.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#120

Post by walshemj »

sheetjs wrote: post #104
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…

Google is a business, and there is a very good chance that they financially benefit from Rap Genius being restored. Other companies that suffer don't have that financial link, and maybe the best course is for them to raise VC funds (and posture themselves so that Google stands to lose if they penalize) I agree with you in theory, but in practice it sounds like you expect google to act as if they care about things lik…

No some one elses site takes over Rap Genus's top spot - might actually increase Google's PPC revenue if the replacement site doesn't answer the question.
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