Hacker News Reader

Comment by sunspeck | Hacker News Reader

Far cleverer RapGenius growth hack exposed:

RG has seemingly generated a unique URL w/<title> for each line of each of each song listing. Google slurps these up and gives them prominent SERP rankings, though the links are all just doorways redirecting to the main song page. (Albeit, redirecting to an anchor at the lyric queried, with highlighting effect and annotation popup to boot. Pretty friendly UX.)

Eg. http://rapgenius.com/9208/Ice-cube-it-was-a-good-day/Today-i...

Thus one song with a remix or two might become 469 search results: https://www.google.com/search?q=And+if+I+hit+the+switch%2C+I...

View on HN

The tactic described in the article is super shady, but this seems totally legit to me. The entire point of RapGenius is annotating individual lines of hip hop songs, so each annotation is a unique bit of content. I have, on many occasions, searched for a particular line in a song and been very pleased that the first result is a direct link to the RapGenius annotation for that line.

I don't think that will help them. I actually think that's a bug.

Having multiple urls that go to the same place will get you penalized for duplicate content in a heartbeat.

They should actually specific a canonical url for each specific line-number url.

So, I don't think it's a "growth hack"--I think it's an oversight that may cost them.

They don't go to the same place - they go to different annotations within the same song which then link back into the full song page.

Such as linking back to the main song page with an anchor replacing the second part of the URL, similar to Gist links with #L31-style line number links?

that's pretty clever!

No it's not, it's 2005-style SEO spamming and will get them their asses kicked in ranking soon (if not already).

I am not sure I understand why this is considered bad, such pages should have very low pagerank anyway (no incoming links) but they do make sense for someone searching some lyrics' lines.

What am I missing?

They are pages with different url's pointing to the same page, without doing an actual redirect. Since url's are a big component of the keywords Google considers, doing that has been an SEO no-no for years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com