

Google penalty for Life? Any hope for reconsideration? Rap Genius next step? - kirtijthorat

Google&#x27;s latest punishment for Rap Genius SEO (bad tactics) has been getting lot of attention in the tech news world. Everyone is discussing about the punishment and the bad tactics but it would be great if we could talk on this topic with a new perspective. Is Google&#x27;s SEO penalty is for Life? Any hope left for Rap Genius (or any organisation affected for that matter) reconsideration? So what do you need to do when this happens to you? I think this topic is worthy of discussion.
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bushido
_> Is Google's SEO penalty is for Life?_

No. It's very temporary, they'll may need to rely less on search engines to
begin with.

 _> Any hope left for reconsideration_

Is there hope? Yes, definitely.

Should there be reconsideration? No. They did something wrong, as in known to
be very very wrong for a very very long time. Reconsidering this for them
opens the doors to other people who may or may not have deliberately done the
same. I'd like my search results to be free of arbitrary human judgement.

One reconsideration that I don't mind is if Google reverses the blacklisting
of the terms "rapgenius" and "rap genius" _but only once_ Google has figured
out a alternate change to their algorithm to control such future behavior,
while penalizing past transgressions.

 _> Any hope left for Rap Genius?_

Sure, lots of it. This is really not that bad. Sure they lost 2/3 of their
traffic overnight, but increasing traffic by 200% is not really a huge
challenge on the web. They will just need to rebuild their traction the right
way, not quite hard since they have a large existing community.

 _> So what do you need to do when this happens to you?_

I mentioned this in a different comment[0], I personally know of a number of
legitimate sites that were invariably affected due to content and blog farms
harvesting their content when Google's panda algorithm rolled out.

They did need to go over any other possibilities for getting flagged, we did
find a couple of unintentional transgressions, for example one of the authors
had been publishing rather short articles, which were more like blurbs of
coherent thought, unique but very easy to get flagged under duplicate filters.
We did not delete those articles but set strict minimum content length rules.

Had to cut back on a few expenses while in recovery.

In the grand scheme of things, panda was just a blip. Once fixed, the traffic
grew exponentially.

Lastly, I welcome these changes, as it gives newer sites and startups a fair
chance to survive and grow.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6966454](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6966454)

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sp332
It's not some deep mystery. They just need to stop doing the things listed in
the Google webmaster guidelines
[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356)

