
Rap Genius is Back on Google - tomlemon
http://news.rapgenius.com/Rap-genius-founders-rap-genius-is-back-on-google-lyrics
======
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.

~~~
skrebbel
You're forgetting something.

As a search engine user, I don't care whether the search engine firm is
"fair", whether their rules apply equally to everyone or not. It's not a
country, it's a search engine.

You can say what you want about Rap Genius, but they're just about the only
lyrics site that doesn't suck. As a searcher, I want to get to sites that
don't suck. In the case of lyrics, that's Rap Genius.

Google has an interest to show me the best results. How they determine those
results, and how much of that process is manual, is up to them. It's nice that
they decided that penalties and virtual spankings are a good thing in the long
run, and it's lovely that you think that they're too inconsistent and unfair
about it, but I'm a user. I don't care. I just want the best results.

~~~
ojbyrne
Except that google is really an ad network, and if it's seen as favoring well-
connected customers over not-well connected customers, then it's going to lose
favor amongst those not-well connected customers.

~~~
aaronwall
This is already happening to some degree, however it has generally mostly been
the smaller & weaker players who have been soaked first. And in many cases the
web & search ultimately helped build up a lot of these players before later
knocking them down.

A lot of people are quite apathetic until the impact is direct. They recognize
their own usage of the service rather than empathizing with a story from
someone who was soaked. Here is a perfect example from a smart, tech savvy
person who is big on self-interest / own vertical, but entirely apathetic
toward other verticals - and this post is less than 4 hours old
[https://twitter.com/blam/status/419537614014672897](https://twitter.com/blam/status/419537614014672897)

The tricky part in all of this is that one man's life work is another man's
spam. Everything at scale has some mix of original editorial vs user generated
content vs scraped & reformatted content vs policing of the mix. Ultimately
the entity with a built in audience will be able to win more and more
verticals over time due to preferential placement. A lot of people are unaware
of how the knowledge graph will keep extending to swallow a larger and larger
portion of the overall query stream. Anything of significant value that can be
structured eventually will.

One of the more alarming articles I have ever read was one from 2007 where the
New York Times explained about Query Deserves Freshness coming about after
Google found that their own new finance service didn't rank as well as it
should have. That was the beginning of the end for the indy web.
[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/business/yourmoney/03googl...](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/business/yourmoney/03google.html?pagewanted=print)

The 2009 recession was the icing on the cake that cut Google's revenue growth
rate & got them fired up on moving beyond direct marketing to focus more on
brand, brand, brand.

------
bushido
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 many months researching any possible reasons to be
penalized and fixing it themselves after repeatedly asking google for help to
no avail.

Could it be that Rap Genius was special because it has Andreessen Horowitz?

Sure seems that way.

I am not going to stop using Google, but I am inclined to use them lesser now.

I would like to hear why, how rap genius was fixed this and what this means
for other people who get penalized from Matt Cutts though!!

~~~
sillysaurus2
They're back on Google, but keep in mind that they're seemingly not in a great
position. Googling "justin beiber lyrics" doesn't show Rapgenius. Neither does
"lady gaga lyrics" or "tupac lyrics". In all three cases, azlyrics.com has the
top spot.

~~~
bushido
Edit: the reply is to the now reacted comment:

    
    
       > They're a startup, and this was a problem which was either going to kill them or be surmounted quickly. Naturally, they surmounted it quickly.
    
       Google laid out a clear plan of action for them. Is it hard to believe they finished it quickly?
    

Yeah, most of the other sites I refer to were also start-ups by almost any
definition.

They did not quite finish their action plan. They got away on _reasonable
doubt_.

This is the first time I am seeing this defense considered by Google.

I willing to bet any other non-vc funded bootstrapped start-up would never be
afforded this consideration by Google.

This rant is not a judgement on Rap Genius, I am actually glad they maneuvered
around this.

I am judging Google.

They have killed other start-ups for reasons such as other sites farming and
duplication their content more vehemently. Reasonable doubt has never been
considered for anybody else and most likely will never be hence forth.

~~~
ashray
I just want to add that this attitude doesn't even reflect poorly solely on
Google Search. Adsense is another product that if you get kicked out of, you
have zero recourse.

What about that gmail fiasco a few months ago? Users got blocked out of G
services for not providing their real names and had no recourse to get their
data for several weeks/months.

Just goes to show that in several cases it's not what you know but who you
know.

------
virtualwhys
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).

------
OoTheNigerian
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 technical details) there would be
little or nothing their investors would have been able to do about that.

BTW, it also helped that people really found Rap Genius useful. I'm sure many
searched had rapgenius appended to it. So the lesson is, make your app so good
that when Google delists you, it will make them look bad.

Thankfully?, there is also a precedence for other offenders to use. if you can
detail you have atoned for your sins and Google insists your you must do a
certain time, you know where to turn to.

BTW, this is Hackernews, and I look forward to the discussion of the
(de)merits of how they scrapped and analyzed 177,000 links and not espousing
of anger that they survived the punishment.

I'm sure Mahbod (my favorite) and co have learned that you do not go
'daaawging' when you are in a hole. I wish them success.

~~~
grimlck
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 is a
meritocracy - as it shows that the connections you have are as important as
raw merit, if not more

~~~
OoTheNigerian
In life there is always a bias. When that bias is against you, you should
learn how to fight back.

This is the PERFECT time for anyone who has done penance and is still being
blacklisted by Google to document it all and go to the press.

There are A LOT of people/journalists waiting to jump on a story that shows
Google has double standards.

But first they must be willing to do their part by documenting these facts and
reaching out the journos. It will not come to them.

Like I quoted _" to save a drowning man....._

~~~
joelrunyon
The only problem with this is that there's no real course of communication
with google. They make it a matter of policy to _not_ provide customer
service.

~~~
aaronwall
"in 2003 when Denise Griffin, the person in charge of Google’s small customer-
support team, asked Page for a larger staff. Instead, he told her that the
whole idea of customer support was ridiculous. Rather than assuming the
unscalable task of answering users one by one, Page said, Google should enable
users to answer one another’s questions."
[http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/mf_larrypage/3/](http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/mf_larrypage/3/)

------
friscobob
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 tough luck little buddy. The double
standard here is fucking sickening.

~~~
argonaut
Disavow?

~~~
friscobob
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.

~~~
aerolite
maserati problem

~~~
friscobob
Why would you say that? This is impacting my Google search results TODAY. If I
turn off Adwords, my leads drop to virtually nothing...

------
jarnix
This post is complete bullshit. Of course they have relations. Maybe they
cleaned their backlinks, but still I cannot believe how they got back so fast
in SERP.

Anyway, Franz Kafka would die again if he saw his text on this site
([http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Franz-kafka-a-dream-
lyrics](http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Franz-kafka-a-dream-lyrics)), so let's
just forget about this site and don't use it.

~~~
tinco
Don't be so spiteful. It might very well be that they have relations, don't
make it sound like that's a bad thing. Besides that they also seem to just
have cleaned up their act very thoroughly.

And about Franz Kafka, I think he'd turn in his grave if he heard about how
petty people like yourself criticize a website that tries to make literary
criticism of his work digestible and enjoyable for the masses.

~~~
ronaldx
> It might very well be that they have relations, don't make it sound like
> that's a bad thing.

It _is_ a bad thing here: it shows that Google is apparently willing to act
preferentially to favoured businesses, undermining the idea that search
results are provided with neutrality.

~~~
tinco
No it doesn't. It means that Google employees can do stuff manually, when
asked by a friend or colleague. It says nothing about Google as a business
favouring Rap Genius as a business.

~~~
ashray
The fact that you can request a google employee in a position to help you out
to do so displays enormous leverage.

Imagine a business in Germany, Vietnam, or even.. Texas having to do the same?
It's pretty much impossible. This is what happens to everyone else out there.

Which is what the parent is referring to when he says that google results
aren't as neutral as they claim to be. They clearly favored someone with
leverage in this instance.

But this is the only instance that we know of. So far.

~~~
tinco
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 same, it just means that knowing a
Google employee with some magic power is a valuable asset.

But yes, if you're a company that doesn't have this asset and you make a
stupid mistake like Rap Genius did your site might be off Google for a month
or two, possibly destroying your business.

I still don't follow how that makes Google not neutral in any significant way.

~~~
ashray
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 is also not really acceptable - too long - given the
impact Google has on a business). It's because experience shows that once you
are on the wrong side of the big G, there's pretty much _nothing_ you can do
to get on the right side. It's no longer a question of a month or two, it's
about registering a new domain, and starting from scratch. Sometimes you have
to do this even when you didn't do anything wrong. This applies to almost
every Google service whether it's Search, Adsense, Gmail, or anything else.

But Rap Genius definitely did something wrong. It was obvious for everyone to
see. Yet, they managed to follow the 'recommendations' and get back in the
game pretty quick. We know that this is probably because of connections
because _every_ business out there that gets blacklisted by Google will make
sure that they are 'regulation-compliant' ASAP. Yet, many of them never manage
to make it back and those that do take years at times.

Yes, knowing the US President helps, but that's provided you can get your work
done without knowing him as well, in a reasonable time frame. Especially when
it may make the difference between running a thriving business and being
homeless.

QED: Monopolies are bad.

~~~
tinco
Alright, I fully agree :)

------
programminggeek
One thing I know is that RapGenius is good about making a big stink, being in
the news, and then having things work out in their favor, even if they were
the ones doing a dumb thing in the first place.

They freaked out at Heroku with decent reason because it was costing them
money, but if they ran their own infrastructure, that would have been a total
non issue and at the scale they are running, why ARE they using Heroku?

They did some incredibly dumb SEO things because they are greedy and are
willing to cheat to win. That is on RapGenius, but once they got banned it is
somehow Google's fault and they should be reincluded? I don't get it.

RapGenius is great at one thing - creating controversy and getting press for
it. I guess that works for them, but it seems like a very selfish way to grow
a business. Instead of focusing on building value themselves, they are willing
to tear down their business partners in public to get what they want.

I'm not sure why this behavior hasn't put them in the same category as Zynga,
Groupon, Swoopo, and all the other companies the tech industry loves to hate.

~~~
jmduke
_They freaked out at Heroku with decent reason because it was costing them
money, but if they ran their own infrastructure, that would have been a total
non issue and at the scale they are running, why ARE they using Heroku?_

Are you arguing that what Heroku was doing wasn't wrong?

 _I 'm not sure why this behavior hasn't put them in the same category as
Zynga, Groupon, Swoopo, and all the other companies the tech industry loves to
hate._

Comments on every single RapGenius post on HN have been filled with vitriol
toward the founders, their attitude, and the culture they foster.

------
LukeB_UK
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?

~~~
MattBearman
Well spotted, it looks like all of their news article URLs end in '-lyrics',
even those when it's not even slightly relevant eg:
[http://news.rapgenius.com/Snapchat-find-friends-abuse-
lyrics](http://news.rapgenius.com/Snapchat-find-friends-abuse-lyrics)

More shady SEO practices from Rap Genius, disappointed but not surprised.

------
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.

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

~~~
ashray
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 your business.

~~~
adidash
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.

------
kanamekun
Pretty interesting decision to include a lengthy "technical digression" in
their SEO apology:

<< Technical Digression: How to scrape 178k URLs in Ruby in less than 15
minutes - Ok, so you have 178k URLs in a postgres database table. You need to
scrape and analyze all of them and write the analysis back to the database.
Then, once everything’s done, generate a CSV from the scraped data. >>

~~~
r0h1n
As I see it, the "technical digression" serves two purposes:

\- first, they use it with Google to show how sincere they were about
"cleaning up"

\- second, and perhaps more important, it gives _Google_ a public excuse to
justify why they restored RG so quickly in rankings. As in, _" Oh they did a
very thorough job of complying by our standards that we had no option but to
restore their status"_.

Unfortunately in this case Google's response speed comes across as a bad
thing. Because it applies to only a very select group of sites that are either
very rich (aka large advertisers) or very well connected.

[Edit: clarified imagined comment]

------
bjoernbu
So which hit should google show for a query like "the fox lyrics"? Of course,
it should be a page that contains the lyrics, but which one? The most popular
one? The one shown by google will be the most popular one.

From an IR perspective, search for lyrics is somewhat strange. I don't think
it's easy to say if some hit is more relevant than the other. Sure, more
popular sites may offer better UX (or simply less annoying ads), but at the
end of the day it's a search for facts.

I wouldn't be surprised if google will serve those lyrics themselves some day.
Freebase (and hence the google knowledge graph) already contains tons and tons
of information on pratically any popular song (organized in a confusion way
via recordings, canonical versions and whatnot) - artist, genre, album,
release dates, length of a recording, etc. I don't think adding the lyrics as
well is totally out of question. After all multible KBs are user curated and
users provides lyrics.

Just like they serve "fact-hits" from their knowledge graph for queries like
"movies by spielberg", google should then be able to serve the lyrics
directly. While this is bad for lyrics sites, imho it is convenient for users
and follows the same prinicple like "movies by spielberg" or "wife tom cruise"

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

~~~
kenjackson
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.

~~~
diydsp
yup. just adding duck duck go to this laptop now. thanks for the reminder.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-
ss...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-
ssl/?src=search)

------
grimlck
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.

------
danso
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?

------
kenshiro_o
Looks like this involved quite a bit of work on Rapgenius' part but I am glad
they cleaned up their mess and apologized to Google.

Moreover, this article feels pretty neutral/humble and techy, a far cry from
the haughty attitude their founders usually display in interviews.

------
dhorowirtz
[http://m.entrepreneur.com/article/230631](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

------
benjaminwootton
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 or Slideshare are doing something similar by
allowing people to embed documents in their websites along with a no follow
link back to their site?

~~~
JohnTHaller
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.

------
sbreaking6
Clear as day there is a double standard. That's what should be discussed.

------
NicoJuicy
Actually, it's understandable that Google set this on High Priority...

#1: it's a high traffic website, that is a startup and the whole deal got a
lot of attention of us (HN Readers) + Matt even saw this here. So it was good
to respond fast (no choice)

#2: RapGenius is dependant on Google (although they try to let you see it as a
social network, but it's not), they would have gone bankrupt ( i suppose)
without Google.

#3: Without a quick response and/or measure to fix their shit on their end,
investors wouldn't invest any more money in RapGenius and Google would
probably hurt a lot of future investments (how is this startup dependent on
Google, ...)

BMW once got a penalty from Google, they didn't got easily off. But their
business wasn't dependent on Google.

Either way, there are both pro and cons to each action. But overall, i think
they handled if fairly well.

------
rasengan
I am sure they went through many sleepless nights during the holidays. Hella
sucks. I think Google is doing the right thing and I am sure not just related
to seo that rap genius learned a lot about themselves and will become
stronger... as well will the overall tech community.

------
ghostdiver
Disavow tool actions take months to bring any effect(if any).

~~~
hippich
after a year I still see "unnatural" inbound links in webmaster tool. So I
would say it have no effect.

------
jdmitch
Interesting closing paragraph:

> _Though Google is an extremely important part of helping people discover and
> navigate Rap Genius, we hope that this ordeal will make fans see that Rap
> Genius is more than a Google-access-only website. The only way to fully
> appreciate and benefit from Rap Genius is to sign up for an account and use
> Rap Genius – not as a substitute for Wikipedia or lyrics sites, but as a
> social network where curious and intelligent people gather to socialize and
> engage in close reading of text._

ie, you should really just become a member rather than relying on google...

Also, where was bing in all of this?!? ;)

~~~
eruditely
Other search sites dropped the ball on this one

------
mgulaid
what does not make sense to me is that after removing all the back-linked
urls, should not that drop Rap Genius's overall ranking even lower than
before, since the artificial boosting has been removed. Why they are back on
the top. googling "lyrics", RP is number #6 in the first page. I think RP has
received special treatment here. Google search team needs to clarify this.

------
sbreaking6
Well atleast now AH partners can get back to posting rap lyrics on twitter. We
wouldn't want anything to stop that bit of entertainment.

------
h1fra
The tech part is obvsiouly here to calm down people from Hacker News and make
them say "Oh this part was good, after all they are not so bad". It's just a
shitty scraper but they talk about it like it was a revolutionnary script...

There is no way they could get back so fast and so easily on google.

------
mathewsimonton
The SEO strats / growth hacks weren't entirely misguided. Rap Genius just
didn't perfect their activity and didn't let it exist entirely behind closed
doors. If Rap Genius wanted to risk it and engage in blackhat-like activity,
it should have at least kept things more quiet and less spammy. Rap Genius
should have kept the finer details, at least, to a phone call with the
blogger.

Google can't see a local business handing their customers/client a $25 gift
certificate in-person for a random positive Google+ review. Along the same
thread, Google would also not be able to see Rap Genius flying out a community
outreach rep to meet with a prolific music blogger at a bar to go over an
exchange for a positive mention and authoritative link. Just saying.

------
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?

------
uladzislau
Probably the story is missing the help of a highly skilled SEO
consultant/company but it's impressive anyway. To get it done so quickly they
had to work 24/7\. Kudos!

------
hippich
I have to note, you have to be big to make comeback like this. Google provided
disavow tool, but from my experience it simply not working. So it is manual
action for sure.

------
wengzilla
Infinite scroll (or some type of weird JS) won't let me get to the bottom of
the page... Ain't got ish to do with this but I just thought that I should
mention.

------
rodly
If Google were to have a year long ban on RG stuff to leave a precedent, Would
people start to view Google as a sub-par search engine because Bing returns
"high quality" results like RG still?

It's also rather weird how a lot of people seem to view Google as this public
service for the people by the people etc, it's not. They can do whatever the
hell they want and if you don't like it, simply stop using their service to
send a message.

------
davemel37
I think it will take time for them to regain their rankings for non-branded
keywords.

I just searched for justin Bieber lyrics and they are sitting in middle of
page 3 on google.

They are ranking for branded searches, but not money keywords.

Although long term, I see this being a net positive for them due to the
thousands of backlinks they got from all the press around this story.

I see it taking them several months to regain rankings...especially if the
links they disavowed were artificially propping them up.

------
jfoster
While we're on this topic, are GroupOn's API Branding Requirements in
violation of Google's webmaster policies?

[http://www.groupon.com/pages/api-branding-
requirements](http://www.groupon.com/pages/api-branding-requirements)

They make it a requirement of using the API that "nofollow" is not used:
"Don’t ‘nofollow’ your links to Groupon."

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

------
undoware
I'm waiting for their next SEO single. "Oops, I did it again!"

------
rburhum
Snapchat could learn a thing or two of how to do PR from this post.

------
naner
Rap Genius appears to have offset their drop in search results traffic with
all the publicity they've been getting from being penalized by Google.

------
joelotz
I give them a lot of credit for being transparent with their learning mistake,
taking ownership, and describing what they did to fix it.

------
tzm
"tis better to apologize later, than ask for permission first."

------
myzerox
This is a relief. RG certainly gives the best search results for a lot of
queries.

This whole story made me fear that Google was choosing power over user
experience.

And that should never be the case, no matter how offending the founders of RG
might appear sometimes. Don't be evil!

~~~
dclara
Is there a smell of corruption? Because it is in favor of power, connections
instead of user voting, just like in favor of dictation over democracy. Isn't
it?

~~~
myzerox
Fair voters = valid pages linking to RapGenius

Bought voters = manipulated SEO spam blog posts

Fair voters >> bought voters

Not reacting to the SEO manipulation would have meant accepting a fraction of
bought voters.

Banning RG completely would have meant to ignore the even bigger fraction of
valid voters.

Google's actual decision seems to be the most democratic: Forcing RG to
decrease the number of bought voters while not dictating over the voice of the
valid voters.

~~~
dclara
You have an interesting point. But it's hard to say:

Fair voters always greater greater than bought voters. When you buy backlinks
from the SEO consulting service, they gave you hundreds or thousands everyday,
just like some people complained in the comments.

"Google's actual decision seems to be the most democratic: Forcing RG to
decrease the number of bought voters while not dictating over the voice of the
valid voters."

The problem is: how can they tell which is which?

I doubt this type of criteria is reliable. I collected some information from
the user comments along with other research and wrote a blog post here:

[http://bingobo.info/blog/bingobo/what-are-the-current-seo-
pr...](http://bingobo.info/blog/bingobo/what-are-the-current-seo-problems.jsp)

Maybe you will also take a look at the possible solutions here:

[http://bingobo.info/blog/bingobo/how-bingobo-can-help-
busine...](http://bingobo.info/blog/bingobo/how-bingobo-can-help-business-
solve-their-seo-problems.jsp)

------
JeremyMorgan
Money wins every time.

------
notastartup
Certainly a double standard exists at Google. I originally thought finally
Google is taking a firm stance, but this reversal only does harm to Google's
image imho. Take home message is, blackhat SEO is forgiven if you are funded
by connected people. Don't have funding or connections but make the slightest
infraction in SEO? Feel the google girth.

