
Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90% - conover
https://www.quantcast.com/rapgenius.com?
======
sillysaurus2
Ok, how can Rap Genius recover from this? They're one of the best (and least
shady) lyrics sites on the net. They acted immorally, yes, but is justifiable
to summarily execute their company?

Google has a domineering position in the market, and it's a bit ironic that
people were quick to call for Microsoft to be split into multiple companies
about a decade ago, yet nobody bats an eye when Google exercises their power.
(I personally don't believe either company should be split; just pointing out
an interesting parallel.)

So what can Rapgenius do? Are they screwed?

EDIT: Also, how long does the penalty last for? I think people are assuming 30
days, but is that really the case?

Even still, 30 days is a _long_ time. They may not be okay afterwards.
Whereas, say, a week-long ban would've had the same deterrent effect.

~~~
JohnTHaller
There is no execution going on. They knowingly engaged in blackhat SEO. Now
they are paying the rather well-known penalty. They need to wait it out while
that penalty is active (likely slimming down their burn rate) and focus on
gaining customers through other avenues.

Or kill their brand and reboot as a different one with a different URL on a
different IP.

~~~
TrainedMonkey
Do not underestimate domain age/link age in calculation of pr. Moving to a
brand new domain would forfeit all of that.

~~~
ceejayoz
Not to mention all inbound links.

~~~
dkuntz2
HTTP 301 ?

~~~
ceejayoz
A penalized site is unlikely to be allowed to pass on its PR.

~~~
dkuntz2
Right. But the inbound links can still get to the new site. What I got from
your comment was concern for other websites who linked to RapGenius, and the
users of those websites...

~~~
ceejayoz
Well, 301ing them is probably going to apply the penalty to the new brand,
making the technique useless for getting back in search results. _Not_ 301ing
them means you're starting out with PR0 all over again, in which case you
might as well just wait out the penalty period. In either situation, the
rebrand on a new domain solution sucks.

------
vijayboyapati
Not only is this bad for RapGenius, it's bad for Google, and most importantly
bad for Google's users. Yes, RapGenius screwed up, and they've paid the price.
But they've publicly recognized what they did and apologized. Google really
should reinstate their ranking, because people searching for lyrics right now
are being given the huge disservice of using the ultra-spammy lyrics sites
from days of yore.

~~~
owenmarshall
>it's bad for Google, and most importantly bad for Google's users

BS.

What's _good_ for Google is showing people that if you engage in bad practices
_your shit will get nuked from orbit_ , even if your site is better than the
competitors.

You'd better believe that companies are going to avoid blackhat SEO in the
future after this, and that's absolutely in Google's interests.

~~~
zorpner
More specifically, companies are going to avoid entering markets (e.g. online
lyrics databases) where Google has demonstrated an unwillingness to
appropriately punish established players who use the same black hat practices,
since it's impossible to compete in the organic rankings against them.

~~~
owenmarshall
>an unwillingness to appropriately punish established players

Can you find another example of the other lyrics sites pushing a quid pro quo
scheme on _Twitter_?

The other lyrics sites might be scummy and Google doesn't care -- or they
might just cover their tracks enough to avoid giving Google enough proof to
hang them.

------
jonknee
Luckily their revenue has remained unchanged... $0. This could have been a
financial disaster if Rap Genius was a real business, but you need to have
revenue for that.

~~~
jonathanjaeger
Many people would kill to have a site with millions and millions of uniques.
If monetization HAD to be the primary focus, they could make money. Growth and
product is the top priority. Unfortunately for them one of those is suffering
right now.

~~~
JohnTHaller
A site with millions of uniques doesn't = revenue. Nor does it equal success,
interest from investors, etc. Source: running a ~2m unique site right now.

~~~
deletes
I have used your site quite often and was wondering why did you decide to make
the downloaded program be wrapped with your executable? Why not just have a
.rar/.zip of the actual program.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Quite a few reasons:
[http://portableapps.com/about/what_is_a_portable_app#whypaf](http://portableapps.com/about/what_is_a_portable_app#whypaf)

~~~
deletes
There are sound arguments towards it. But _Better Upgrading_ scares me.

~~~
JohnTHaller
It shouldn't :) Back with Firefox 1.x I think, we were using ZIP files and
always supported unzip over the old one. But we ran into a situation where if
a file was there from the previous version, it would remain since the new
version no longer had that file. Oddly, the new version would try to use the
old file and crash. That was back when I was only doing Firefox and
Thunderbird, I think. As we added in apps like OpenOffice and GIMP it became
much more of an issue.

So, we have the PA.c Installer able to take directives like whether or not to
preserve everything in App, whether to preserve or remove specific files,
whether to preserver or remove specific directories, etc. In addition to
overwriting the existing files with the new ones, of course. This made life a
lot easier on everyone. And users didn't need to worry about manually deleting
specific directories but keeping others when updating. You just point the new
version to the same X:\PortableApps\AppNamePortable directory and it
intelligently upgrades. It even supports custom code for things that fall
outside those simple keep/preserve so we can specifically remove certain
settings on an upgrade where a given app breaks its own settings and doesn't
support the old ones, etc.

For example, I just wrote the package for FreeCommander XE Portable for the
publisher to release. The new one doesn't support the old settings and will
break if they remain, so I have the installer back them up within Data (just
in case the user wants to revert manually later). I then had it read the
preferred language from the old settings and write them into the new ones for
the user for convenience. I could get more explicit and read/write other
settings as well if I had the time.

------
spindritf
To recap. Google's algorithm is terrible, and despite having more PhDs on
board than my uni, can be played by anyone with two brain cells and a mildly
popular Twitter account.

To rectify this, they crippled my search results by penalizing Rapgenius and
instead pushing some AZlyrics junk that not only lacks annotations but is
inaccurate.

Seems like an easy fix, for the end user at least, add a keyword search for
'lyrics' to go directly to Rapgenius, right? No. Here's a search for smoke on
the water

[http://rapgenius.com/search?q=smoke%20on%20the%20water](http://rapgenius.com/search?q=smoke%20on%20the%20water)

First result? Pro Era – Like Water. Second? Childish Gambino – I. The Worst
Guys. Third? Smoke DZA – Diamond.

Arguably the most popular song in the history of rock and roll? Sixth.

Those are some of the smartest people on the planet. I'm not being sarcastic.
How depressing.

~~~
dkuntz2
They didn't really push AZLyrics, or any other lyrics site up. Those rankings
haven't changed. Their position relative in the list you see based on your
search terms has, but that's _relative_.

Why should Google give special dispensation to RapGenius? Why should putting
in something like "lyrics" or related content to someone being penalized get
them to show up higher in the results?

Why should Google be RapGenius' search engine? Why shouldn't RapGenius make
their search better?

~~~
spindritf
RapGenius should have a better search. And Google shouldn't give special
dispensation to RapGenius, it should return best possible results.

Which they don't after excluding RapGenius. They purposefully broke their
search results to protect their broken ranking method.

~~~
dkuntz2
How is their ranking method broke? Most searches you make probably give you
what you want within the top five results (excluding lyrics, as you've shown a
weird need to have RapGenius be the source of your lyrics).

How can you _prove_ RapGenius is the "best result"? Especially considering
that courts have ruled that ranking algorithms are just opinions. You can be
of the opinion that RapGenius is better, but that's your _opinion_. Multiple
people can also be of the same opinion, which is a huge factor involved in
Google's ranking algorithm. Another huge factor involved in their ranking
algorithm is dissuading blackhat SEO techniques, which can make it appear like
lots of people are of the opinion something is good.

So, again, while you are of the opinion RapGenius is the best lyrics site, I'm
not, even before all this brouhaha started I didn't really like their site,
especially the annotations, which to me seemed like a bunch of bored English
majors who didn't really have any insights on the annotations they were
making, but wanted you to think they were really smart. I also don't listen to
rap music, which might also affect my view on the annotations.

------
brianpgordon
It's pretty scary how much Google controls the internet. I wish Bing or Yahoo
or DuckDuckGo weren't so much worse than Google, or I'd happily use them.

~~~
captainmuon
Give me just 20-30 million dollars, legal protection from any patent claims,
and (providing my search engine works well technically) make it the default in
a small percentage of all Firefox installs.

What I'm trying to say is, Google doesn't have the monopoly because they're
the only ones who can build a good search engine. The have the monopoly
because they _do_ have good technology, but also because of path dependence,
and because there is no political effort to build up a competitor.

I already posted a couple of days ago, there are a bunch of ways governments
could support competitors when one search engine controls a large fraction of
the market, say more than 2/3\. For example a special monopoly tax, subsidies
for competitors, etc.

One thing I think would be nice is to make search engines offer a free/very
cheap API (as long as they have > XX % market share). Anybody can come along
and build a Google + Bing + Pokemon-Wiki meta search engine. If you tune it to
be profitable, you'll have a lot of competing search engine frontends spring
up. But you'll also have a lot of search engine backends (and not just Bing,
Google, and Yandex), because its suddenly profitable to build verticals (e.g.
indexing just tech news or recipies), which require less resources technically
- because the vertical backends get traffic through the competing frontends.

And I could choose a frontend that gives me Google-like searches, or one that
interprets terms more literal (like when you use +"term" in Google), which
would be great for programming related stuff. There could be another one
focussing on social media, or local stuff, etc..

------
clarky07
It seems somewhat unreasonable to manually penalize a website like this. If
you can't figure it out algorithmically then it can't be that bad. Major
companies (much bigger than Rap Genius) buy links all the time. How do I know?
They have asked me for them. I used to run a financial blog and I know a
certain company that bought links from pretty much every personal finance blog
that would sell one to them, and I know this for a fact because I was in a
network of blogs and talked about this on forums as a way to make money. I
also have the emails to prove it.

Why doesn't this company get penalized? I have no idea. I guess nobody decided
to write a blog post about it, it didn't get picked up on Hacker News, and
Matt Cutts hasn't noticed it yet. Seems like if this is possible there should
be a reverse black hat market springing up soon. Do some really bad black hat
SEO for your competitors and then get them killed by Google.

------
goldenkey
It wasn't so genius to be expository to random people via email, about a link-
back scam. Sorry RapDingus, it's over; maybe next go around you'll have less
hubris and daringness in using unethical practices.

[http://jmarbach.com/rapgenius-growth-hack-
exposed](http://jmarbach.com/rapgenius-growth-hack-exposed)

~~~
sscalia
If you think this isn't happening all the time, everywhere -- you're mistaken.

~~~
goldenkey
Not many funded startups are dumb enough to publicly email folk asking for
links in return for tweets/linkbacks. That's pure stupidity; might as well
upload a video on a bad political stance with your brand overlayed, because
the worms don't stay in the can with any kind of public communication. They
should have been more clock-and-dagger with their scheming -- their hubris was
their downfall.

Of course many spammy sites use this practice but they don't have the respect
from the tech community that Rap Genius warrants as a Y-Combinator funded
entity. They lost that, and it's going to be a steep climb for them to find
talented folk that want to be part of a seedy operation.

------
minimaxir
What's interesting is that the number of uniques is on a downward linear trend
after the initial penalty.

------
istorical
SEO is such a fickle beast.

To everyone here who's saying they brought this upon themselves, when rules
are unenforced and all your competition breaks them, you've already hamstrung
yourself if you don't break them too.

If everyone in the MLB is juicing and a rookie gets caught, you don't say
"what an idiot", you look at either 1) enforcing the rules on everyone and
broadly changing the culture or 2) question whether the rules make sense in
the first place.

~~~
codygman
No. They broke the terms of service. They got banned. End of story.

~~~
istorical
What's it like seeing the world in black and white?

~~~
codygman
Not sure. I'm too busy seeing all the gray lines that would be created by
Google giving preferential treatment to those deemed more "important" when
they could have stayed black and white.

~~~
istorical
My point is that punishing RapGenius despite the blatant use of the same
tactics by hundreds of other big internet brands IS preferential treatment.
The fact that RapGenius' competitors weren't punished is giving THEM
preferential treatment.

Either punish everyone or punish no one.

~~~
codygman
You know I think you are right. We should also apply this to murderers.

Find and punish all the murders or let them all go free!

------
Greenisus
What should Google do in this situation? I fully understand them murdering Rap
Genius in their indexes, but it also hurts Google since Rap Genius actually
has the best content.

First result for "jay-z holy grail lyrics" Google:
[http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jayz/holygrail.html](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jayz/holygrail.html)
Bing: [http://rapgenius.com/Jay-z-holy-grail-lyrics](http://rapgenius.com/Jay-
z-holy-grail-lyrics)

The Bing result is better (though both are valid).

I would suspect that most sites pulling these sort of SEO scams are going to
have lousy content, so the rule makes sense, but perhaps there should be some
sort of human element to it as well? That's not scalable, though, so I'm not
really sure what the best answer for Google is on this one.

~~~
dkuntz2
Is the Bing result really "better"? Lots of people would rather not have the
annotations...

Additionally, with AdBlock on, AZLyrics makes only 21 requests and takes 1.03
seconds to load completely on my machine. RapGenius (still with AdBlock on)
takes 27 seconds to load, with 208 requests. Based solely on that I'd rather
use AZLyrics than RapGenius.

~~~
Greenisus
Yeah, I suppose it's subjective. I personally think the RapGenius result is
better, but you make a valid point about the performance and simplicity of the
AZLyrics result.

------
jmduke
Hypothetical question: if we ("we" being nebulous) were to unveil that every
other major lyrics site (azlyrics, metrolyrics, stlyrics, lyricsfreak,
lyrics365, etc. etc.) uses the same SEO tactics, would they receive the same
attention and punishment?

~~~
captainmuon
Someone should just do blackhat SEO for a bunch of those sites, and then
Google would have to punish them too (because who could proove that they
didn't do it themselves?)

Or taking it one step further, use these tactics to promote a controversial
institution or politician (without them knowing). Then "leak" it to Google, so
they get punished. Then claim Google is censoring them. Finally enjoy the
outrage :-)

~~~
poopsintub
Domain and page authority weigh in on how much you can get away with link
tactics imo. Sites that have been around for a few more years would likely
withstand any blackhat tactics a third-party would shoot at them.

------
physcab
They'll recover. As much as I dislike their PR attitude (whether an act or
not), they have a good product. I still listen to rap music, and I still want
to know the meaning of the lyrics, so I'll go directly to the site if I have
to. Google made it one click easier, but whatever, I have time.

Companies have survived much worse blows. I worked for a music company that
was not only being sued by every major record company, they were also taken
out of all app stores. They persisted, and today I still listen to music from
their site, even almost a decade later.

------
zinssmeister
It's quite painful to watch these guys take this beating. What they've done
wasn't nice, but the consequences are extreme. What is most concerning is the
monopoly Google Search has over driving traffic/revenue for most sites.

------
maaaats
I've missed some news lately with Christmas and all. Any context on this?

~~~
conover
Context:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963365)

------
boxy
The title of this post has annoyed me.

------
champion
damn, they got CUTT

------
sscalia
"Don't be evil"

Rapgenius got punished for playing the game better than anyone else.

Who's to say this couldn't happen to highly relevant sources of information?
Wikipedia? Underground sites?

This is the equivalent of censorship.

~~~
JohnTHaller
First, you don't understand what censorship is.

Second, RapGenius cheated the system. They knew they were cheating the system.
They violated the public guidelines that tell you not to cheat the system. And
now they are paying the price.

Why is that so difficult to grasp?

~~~
goldenkey
In addition, they had no furtiveness; it appeared they thought this was
something that required no concealment. I'm guessing they don't have a media
relations employee, because any decent quality control would have said direct
emails from @rapgenius to random folk about a seedy scheme aren't the best
idea. At least a proxy should have been used..

Their emails were wanton risk, the wording had no stealth; they got what they
deserved.

~~~
randallsquared
> it appeared they thought this was something that required no concealment.

Exactly so. It seems they were doing it in the open because they didn't
understand that anyone would object.

------
almosnow
what if... rapgenius is a beautiful pr stunt cooked by google to show everyone
how valuable it is for websites/startups?

