
Rapgenius.com Traffic and Demographic Statistics - themichael
https://www.quantcast.com/rapgenius.com?country=GLOBAL
======
ecaron
Can someone explain why this is a topic worthy of discussion? I get that they
had a SEO tactic, Google penalized them, they offered an empty apology for it,
and now we're up to the present.

Stating the obvious of "traffic drops when Google penalizes you" seems like a
"sun rose again today"-type story.

~~~
ruswick
Why? Because the sheer magnitude is crazy. Rap Genius's traffic fell by nearly
_two thirds_! This is a very prominent, YC-affiliated startup that is being
nuked by Google. It should come as no surprise that the news is seen as
significant by the HN crowd.

Moreover, I think many people are upset with the scope of Google's punishment.
De-weighting RG is one thing, nuking it into the ground is entirely different,
and is in my opinion unwarranted. Even searching directly for the name of the
site does not yield any Rap Genius results.

If I type "Rap Genius" into Google, I am justified in expecting Rap Genius to
be the first result. Period. When Google goes out of its way to effectively
expunge a site from existence (to the extent that Google can expunge a site),
they are doing a massive disservice to their users and are degrading the
quality of their search results.

There is no reason that a response of this magnitude by Google is justified,
and by issuing such a draconian response, Google has lessened the usability of
their product and done a disservice to their users.

~~~
zach
Penalties are blunt instruments.

The whole point of this penalty is that Google cannot trust the signals that
are in its index when it comes to Rap Genius's site. And it sure isn't
Google's fault that they can't.

Can Google subtract out all the "naughty stuff" and decide if Rap Genius
deserves to even be on the front page for "rap genius" anymore? I doubt it.

If Google's search had a category for "obvious searches" then yes, maybe they
could apply a penalty as delicately as possible. But delicateness is not
really the point. Dropping them down 50 spots is blunt and simple. I think
everything about this approach makes sense.

~~~
loceng
From I what I heard the penalty is only for a month long? Still, what other
practices has Rap Genius been using all this time, without being caught, in
order to gain so much traffic?

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dantillberg
This is comparing pre-Christmas-day traffic to Christmas-day traffic. Many
people spend December 25th doing very different things than they do other days
of the year.

~~~
rlt3
I'd say it probably has something to do with Google penalizing them.

A lot of people get new albums from the holidays and would want to look up
lyrics.

~~~
jjaredsimpson
either way, 1 data point isn't a trend. wait and see is the best course of
action.

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yalogin
Why is Rap Genius afforded this coverage? There are a lot of SEO scammers out
there and are punished as found. Reading through one of those TC articles it
appears that they were interviewed on stage by TC during one of their events
too. Why is a scammy link baity company given this importance?

~~~
skrebbel
Three reasons:

1) The site itself isn't actually half bad, especially when compared to other
lyrics sites.

2) They're a YC company, and took money from other big investors. This
automatically makes them high-profile on places like HN.

3) The founders often publically act like douchebags, write emails with bad
spelling, and generally seem to think that being cool is the most important
part of running a startup. I suspect that this is just for show, but still,
many people want to see them fail because of this. This article is about them
failing, so it gets upvoted by those people.

~~~
AVTizzle
Also, nobody seems to mention the fact that this story was created out of an
HN thread... I imagine that has a lot to do with everyone's interest in it.

~~~
obstacle1
Indeed. People are forgetting that the only reason RG came to G's attention is
because Matt Cutts stumbled across the HN thread and took action.

------
programminggeek
This is not at all surprising, they did a dumb thing because they got
desperate and greedy.

In the words of DMX, stop being greedy: [http://rapgenius.com/Dmx-stop-being-
greedy-lyrics](http://rapgenius.com/Dmx-stop-being-greedy-lyrics)

Also, as of right now they aren't showing up on google for "stop being greedy
rap genius"
[https://www.google.com/search?q=stop+being+greedy+rap+genius](https://www.google.com/search?q=stop+being+greedy+rap+genius)

~~~
notastartup
Another one of DMX's classics: X Gonna Give It To You
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jkeRpQKFDg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jkeRpQKFDg)

    
    
        Arf arf
        Yeah, yeah, yeah (Grrrr)
        Uh, Yeah don't get it twisted
        This rap shit, is mine
    

What if X is actually Google? Could DMX have predicted this whole ordeal? 63%
drop in traffic is absolutely insane. It's not like Google is going to
backtrack their decision so recovery seems impossible now when typing rap
genius doesn't even show up their main site.

------
skizm
As a total aside, how do sites like Quantcast and Alexa get traffic
information from other websites that they don't have code on? (or do they?) I
feel like getting accurate traffic statistics on one's own website is tough
enough.

~~~
jhonovich
This is 'directedly measured data' from RapGenius (notice the icon / message
in the upper right hand corner). RapGenius voluntarily added tracking code to
their website to enable Quantcast to do this.

In this case, then, the numbers are likely to be quite accurate.

~~~
skizm
Ah, cool. I did not see that. That makes much more sense.

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amirhirsch
you're looking at christmas day. it'll be more interesting in a week.

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exizt88
Interesting thing to note: the severity of penalty may be hurting Google too.
It was already mentioned that Rap Genius lyrics can't be found even when the
words "Rap Genius" are included in the query. So when a user wants to find a
Rap Genius lyrics page via Google (as is the custom for most of them), Google
fails to provide them with a relevant result.

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joshmlewis
It looks like this is because all the stats aren't in for December 25th yet.
If you look at other sites, they also have a slant. It didn't look like last
year Christmas traffic had much of an effect on numbers, so I will credit this
to information not being complete yet.

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random42
It'd be interesting to see which website(s) benefited from the diversion of
this traffic.

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ddorian43
Worse happened to Quickmeme when they were banned from reddit for bot-voting.

~~~
AlecSchueler
Do you have any sources/further information on their numbers?

~~~
ddorian43
[http://www.reddit.com/r/JusticePorn/comments/1hgceg/quickmem...](http://www.reddit.com/r/JusticePorn/comments/1hgceg/quickmemes_website_ranking_drop_after_being/)

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ateevchopra
Thats well quite as expected. But I think out of those 493K, most is from the
blogs posting their penalty news. This might go even lower !

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mvkel
The more interesting point is how this illustrates how many businesses are
almost completely reliant on Google to make their business viable.

We hear all the time that it's not good business practice to rely on someone
else's service to drive one's business (building a Facebook app as a business,
etc.), but how many of us include Google search results in the mix?

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mrbuchuk
Their site traffic growth over the past 6 months is impressive. And Google hit
them where it hurts most given that 70% of their visits come via search. More
details on Rapgenius.com analytics here
[http://www.similarweb.com/website/rapgenius.com](http://www.similarweb.com/website/rapgenius.com)

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dbg31415
I'm sorry, do we really think that Christmas is an accurate sample day?
L2Math.

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jpatel3
Funnily, that gives idea that how much traffic bing contribute.

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metaobject
What exactly did they do that google didn't like?

~~~
k-mcgrady
They recruited bloggers and offered to tweet links to their posts in exchange
for putting code linking to RG pages on their blog. It was on here a few days
ago and Google quickly removed them from 1st page search results as
punishment.

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jpatel3
Its example where trick of growth hacking went wrong!

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Kiro
OT but how do lyrics sites handle copyright issues?

~~~
k-mcgrady
I believe they are meant to license the lyrics although accordingly to this
article many don't: [http://consequenceofsound.net/2013/11/rap-genius-and-
other-l...](http://consequenceofsound.net/2013/11/rap-genius-and-other-lyric-
websites-hit-with-copyright-infringement-notices/)

------
tarheel12
Thats a huge drop. How accurate is Quantcast?

~~~
Phil_Latio
When even the main domain is on page 6 or whatever, it will drop more.
Quantcast requires site owners to implement a tracker, so I guess it's pretty
accurate.

Here is some drastic example I found recently (thin/spammy content penalty I
guess):

[http://extremetracking.com/free?login=fm3u91](http://extremetracking.com/free?login=fm3u91)
[http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/freemp3us.com](http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/freemp3us.com)

From 14,000,000 uniques a month down to ~80 a day :D But obviously Google
still has work to do, since that site made a lot of money within that 1-2
months period.

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infruset
What if the remaining traffic is mainly due to HN people reading this article?
Then they're in real trouble..

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001sky
_Error! We are unable to retrieve traffic data for this property at the
moment._

Well, thats intersting...

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nailer
What does 'online' mean? How can there be more people mobile than the total
online?

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ivanbrussik
still way way too early to tell, lets take a look on the 28th before we all go
making friends

~~~
sarreph
What do you mean exactly by 'making friends'?

~~~
ivanbrussik
its way too early to be friends as well, lets wait a few days.

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Mc_Big_G
This is the best PR stunt ever.

~~~
jpatel3
accidental one!

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lanbird
hahaha hope its not after my suggestion to google on there facebook page

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wehadfun
Could they simply pay Google $$$ to fix this issue?

~~~
omarchowdhury
Haha!

