Open Letter to Google About Rap Genius SEO
news.rapgenius.com
news.rapgenius.com
The argument that you only tweet out high quality content is nil when you consider you were "Paid" with a link to tweet it out. How do you remove the inherent bias? Wouldn't you tweet out a high pr site you want more links from, even if it wasn't relevant?
You are in a high interest sector with SO MANY LEGIT STRATEGIES TO ATTRACT HIGH VALUE LINKS NATURALLY... Why are you wasting time with spammy strategies that haven't worked in several years?
Edit: mirror, since I'm betting the text will be modified soon considering the reactions here. http://pastebin.com/dMh7dgxp
Other than that, i have no concerns.
When you know your competition is playing dirty, you can join them or choose to rise above. There are legitimate arguments for both. They chose to play dirty, and I wouldn't be surprised if this weakened their position in the long term
They chose the short long way... They should have chosen the long short way.
Take a look at the source of the very reputable: www.usatoday.com/sports/ and search for "NFL Tickets". Blatant link buying by vivid seats. SeatGeek does this all over the place as well. When you have really strong competitors buying links like this and getting away with it--it's the only way to compete.
In my experience Google has never penalized a competitor for doing this in my niche, therefore to compete I have to do it as well.
What Rapgenius is doing is very innocent compared to a lot of what is going on out there.
This is my first hand experience: I was contacted by an "SEO Consultant" who wanted to publish an article in one my sites for $40. I went along, exchanged a few emails, and managed to get the "article" this company wanted to publish.
Bottom line was that they wanted to place link's to Tesco's LED bulbs site:
Text: decorative and useful living room accessory
URL: http://www.tesco.com/direct/home-garden/lighting/cat3376614.catMore importantly, any strategy that is against Googles quality guidelines that works today, probably wont work forever, or even for another several months. The pain and suffering of getting slapped by google is much too intense to justify the short term gains.
Matt Cutts himself said recently that the best way to discourage spammers is not just to hurt their bottom line, but to "Break Their Spirits." http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-search-spa...
That's why Google has to have these scare tactics to stop people from doing them. If they didn't work then Google and you and everyone else who's up in arms over this would just ignore these links.
I can guarantee you that if you do a backlink analysis of everyone ranking ahead of rapgenius for these search terms they will have thousands of these types of backlinks.
I definitely agree that Google wouldn't be so vocal about buying links, if it wasn't a real threat to the quality of their SERPs.
That being said, this particular strategy from Rap Genius most certainly does not work. There are just too many obvious signals that those links are unnatural.
Why not go for the single link, in content, without exact match anchor text, with content near the link with the text you want to rank for...
http://wiep.net/link-value-factors/
If you're gonna ask bloggers for links, start with legit outreach strategies, why open with an obvious barter. I bet broken linkbuilding http://www.brokenlinkbuilding.com/ is a treasure trove of opportunity in the lyrics vertical. or simple Start with just sharing great content that is relevant, and nurture relationships with bloggers. Why buy them off, when you have such a great web property?
For a list of more strategies... http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
why not try this strategy while your at it... It would work perfectly for Rap Genius. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688175
Just checking but have you reported the competitors?
it's about traffic. thus spake zara.
Can we get them banned on HN? NSA-level penalized? Insta-dead?
This also isn't the first time a YC company has had ethical issues called out on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711
They aren't using HN to submit content spam. (fwiw, there was another YC startup in a similar niche doing just that earlier this year. That startup appears to be dead/zombie now.)
The apology seems to indicate that they only think they did something grayhatish. In reality it was the worst kind of link spam...buying links.
1. rapgenius is probably the least spammy lyrics site on the internet, and definitely so amongst those on the first page of search results. As a consumer, I would not have a problem with Google, et al giving rapgenius results a special algorithmic bump to move them up. I also know that this is an opinion - it may be a popular opinion, but it is still inherently subjective.
2. If I was in rapgenius' shoes, I imagine gaming SEO would be a strategy to be seriously considered - one doesn't get into the music lyrics market without being aware of the current state of affairs. Barry Bonds believed he was the best hitter of his era, and if McGwire and Sosa were going to get credit for breaking the home run record while taking steroids, then damnit he was going to take steroids and hit 70 bombs. IMO, this is not a morality play.
3. But I do not care for the public personae of the rapgenius founders. They come off as juvenile and occasionally offensive, and I think they are bad representatives for consumer internet start-ups. I'm pretty sure this is a common opinion on HN, but I am not sure how much it should color our judgment of their actions.
As they say, the game is the game.
[EDIT] grammar
I don't know much about them, but I did see this video from earlier this year, where they don't seem to be "in character":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpvrWdfEUHg
You compare that to some of their others, and you get the impression they're smart (if a little weird).
2. Gaming SEO is attractive to almost everybody. Google needs to make it so painful to get caught, that people won't bother risking it in the future. The way I see it is...even if Googles algorithms havent caught up just yet to surface the best quality content, they will eventually, why not speed up the process of meeting them in the middle and focus on legit link acquisition and traffic acquisition strategies...
3. I have no opinions about Rap Genius or their founders, I think their actions deserve a massive penalty...let them run ppc for those long tail lyric lines, I doubt those clicks cost more than a nickel. Let them clean up their act, and go through the channels to request a reinclusion in the index.
The game is the game is a poor excuse. give me $15mm and a site like Rap Genius and I'll get it outranking everybody in the space in 9 months, with only legit strategies.
If you believe this doesn't already happen, then you and I must be using different internets. Simply by being selective in which aspects of SEO gaming they chose to address, in what order, and to what extent, they are making editorial decisions. If you're working in an industry where search results are already dominated by low-level SEO manipulation (say, maybe, music lyrics?), are you expected to stand by and let Google be the arbiter of if and when that issue is addressed?
> why not speed up the process of meeting them in the middle and focus on legit link acquisition and traffic acquisition strategies...
My guess is that will be the very likely outcome of this whole brouhaha. It would also not come as a surprise to me if this was the goal all along - getting Matt Cutts' attention is hard, until you're doing something wrong.
You seem to know a lot about SEO, definitely more than me. But it feels like you are expressing a criticism that presumes that this behavior has been happening, and has been tolerated, for some time.
Rap Genius has the quality content. The fact that they have to rely on these link building techniques to rise above the trash shows a flaw in Google's approach to ranking.
Now that we have that settled, and you are looking for a new search engine, let me suggest http://www.plexisearch.com/
It uses a lot less Page Rank style rankings, we don't have to do much delisting since we can usually tell using NLP if a site is any good.
If Google makes it painful to get caught while also doing a poor job algorithmically catching people, it just incentivizes people to do "pump and dump" type sites where they use blackhat tactics to get a lyric site to the top of Google and then rinse and repeat when they get caught.
The most optimal way to make money with SEO right now is to rank quickly with blackhat SEO tactics and then when you get penalized you create a new site and start over again. This means the competitive serps are always in a state of flux as there is a revolving door of short term sites.
This hurts legit sites - they have a lot to lose by breaking Google's policies so even if they offer a better experience they'll be outranked by short term sites that don't care about Google's policies since they expect to only last half a year anyways.
> The game is the game is a poor excuse. give me $15mm and a site like Rap Genius and I'll get it outranking everybody in the space in 9 months, with only legit strategies.
Give me $20,000 and I'll outrank a "clean" $15mm budget since I won't be barred from doing the things that actually work. It might only survive 6 months, but I'll make a positive ROI and I'll repeat the process again.
I am not sure which blackhat strategies you are referring to, but I find that long term the ROI on doing legit strategies greatly outperforms blackhat strategies. (I should note that i have no idea how to cloak or hack edu sites, so I am mostly referring to buying links, and other link schemes.)
Look at a site like The Oatmeal. Look at matt inmans old dating site http://www.oneplusyou.com/q that linkbuilding strategy is amazingly effective.
More importantly, I find focusing on building referral traffic not only makes me not depend on search traffic, but it also drives up my search rankings.
However if you are looking to make money and you don't have a value add to offer, it's very easy to quickly throw together a website, plaster some ads, do blackhat SEO, and very quickly make a lot of money while only working 10 hours/week since you don't have to actually worry about providing anyone anything of value (and it's not like doing blackhat SEO is that difficult to do).
Because of the above, if you are strictly looking at ROI and SEO is one of your main sources for traffic (which would be the case for a lyrics site) it makes a lot more sense to focus your efforts on SEO than it does to focus your efforts on creating an awesome website.
Edit: For whoever downvoted me, if you think I'm wrong I'd love to hear why.
"We soon ranked for competitive keywords such as "Cash Advance," "Payday Loans," and a few EDU lead generation terms. Our success led to Google receiving a number of spam complaints along with some unfavorable press in the Guardian that referred to me as genius/fiend. The consequence of all of this is that we were penalized by Google. We no longer ranked for "Free Online Dating" and other dating related keywords. In fact, we no longer even rank for very brand-specific keywords such as "JustSayHi". In short, we had been completely banned from search results.
As soon as we discovered that we had been penalized, we immediately filed a reconsideration request. Matt Cutts got involved in the case personally, but after a couple of emails, the penalty was not lifted."
Sounds familiar!
I think matt's strategy today would be more of a growth hack than a link building strategy. I think egobait still works quite well.
Is songmeanings spammy at all? They didn't even have ads for the longest time, and they don't do crappy a-dozen-pop-unders like other sites these days.
A company that I would support would look at the link tactic and say, "damn, that's anti-consumer, anti-business, and pretty shady all around. Let's build our site traffic by making our content better and working with Google to figure out ways to improve our site's searchability."
It's not like they are complete posers. They got investment from Nas.
In any case this weekend we are going to have them play some heads-up
poker, a set of tennis, a drinking contest - a winner gwan emerge
(Ilan) and you girls gonna see wassup. If you wanna cover these
"World's Sexiest Startup Man" events you are welcome - we will get you
soused up you gonna feel nice.
Let me cut to the chase: Ilan's sexy is $15M Zach's is $10M YOU FEEL
ME? You know what I'm saying now? You feel me..
[1] http://valleywag.gawker.com/anti-foreigner-vc-also-supports-...
In other words, stop acting like Jay-Z and start acting like Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg, on the other hand, wears T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers.
Where are you getting your preconceived notions from? Ask yourself.
[1] - http://www.regalrealness.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/jay-... [2] - http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/5034ed43eab8ea7e2d0... [3] - http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1183!/img/httpIm... [4] - http://www.okayafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/jay-z-world-tou... [5] - http://richkidsbrand.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/jayz2.jp... [6] - http://www.aceshowbiz.com/images/wennpic/jay-z-premiere-the-...
They just seem like massive, massive toolbags.
I find them extremely distasteful. They're trying way too hard.
My tastes are pretty middlebrow and all I could think to search for was Non piu andrai, which I couldn't find, but as far as poetry goes they've got works like The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Ode to a Grecian Urn, and for literature they've got Joyce's amazing short story (and set at Christmastime) The Dead, The Cask of Amontillado, and with annotations by the founder Mahbod, War and Peace (he also says one of his favorite books is Nicholas Nickleby, which is not really an obvious choice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo#t=1018).
1. rapgenius is probably the least ...
2. If...
3. But...
As they say...
= So, its not that complicated. I think you got the main ponts.
I agree. I too, am occasionally perturbed when these "Silicon Valley" types show up to meeting without a suit and tie and wearing their "hipster" beards.
I've always found them reasonably professional, particularly their evidence-driven handling of the Heroku load distribution debacle.
http://news.rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-l...
I feel that being able to communicate in a traditionally-professional manner increases overall chance of success. But this is only because it is generally accepted that such a tone can signal trustworthiness. So even more important is the ability to communicate trustworthiness, whatever that may precisely mean, and the exact parameters of this vary by correspondents. If the people you truly value are skeptical of symbols of tradition and establishment, then a good marketing practice would be to adopt an anti-establishment brand.
So while I'm aware of tone, I try to refrain from overreacting to it, and try to give the content/actions a fair shake. All that said, in this particular case of collusive link building, I do find him shady and abusive/disrespectful toward the internet community.
The problem is Google's algorithms heavily favor older sites that have been accumulating massive amounts of backlinks with targeted anchor text for years & years. An upstart like Rapgenius doesn't stand a chance.
Another problem is that Google seems to only selectively enforce "violations" of their terms of service like this. Some sites get away with these violations forever, so you'll never be able to catch them in traffic unless you play dirty too.
I should know: I have a niche e-commerce site with a blatantly obvious better shopping experience than most competitors, but unless I use similar tricks I'm nowhere to be found in Google's results. And "natural" link building doesn't really work for us, there's not enough people writing about my niche and quite frankly its not really that interesting--so it's not really possible to get "natural" links without coercing people.
Google, your system is totally broken.
For example, it's hard to search for certain medical information because of so many pop songs clouding out results for "how the heart beats," etc. There will be more and more aliasing and hacking through keywords to distinguish between pop uses of heart and medical uses of heart until eventually people will learn which search mechanism to use for what purpose. Google will most likely ride the mainstream into the sunset, the Sears of our generation.
There are certainly many ways to generate legit quality links in boring niches, which rapgenius is certainly not plagued by that problem.
The challenge here is putting too much stock in search traffic. I find when I focus on audience building and generating referral traffic that serp rankings follow.
For example, compare Rap Genius’ (RG's) annotated edition of Justin Bieber's new hit single "Heartbreaker" – which dozens of Bieber fans have annotated with details of his break up with Selena Gomez – to AZLyrics’ version of the same
Excessive link exchanges ("Link to me and I'll link to you") or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking
We don’t do this.
That is, links shared on Twitter may give temporary traffic to fan sites, but not long-term link juice.
get you MASSIVE traffic
With limited tools (Open Site Explorer), we found some suspicious backlinks to some of our competitors:
[0]- http://jmarbach.com/rapgenius-growth-hack-exposed
Looks like an apology but is a huge SEO push.
Interestingly enough - they weren't very specific about getting penalized and/or when it happened.
RapGenius != Lyrics site
Lyrics site != text annotation site
Open Letter to Google About Rap Genius SEO != apology
If RapGenius wants to grow on the back of a the lyrics searches with dodgy SEO tactics, and wants to win both on the lyrics and annotations SERP they will not be providing users with what they want.
But the whole idea and vision of RapGenius (and why their investors bit) was because of their goal of "annotating the whole internet."
They don't want to be just a lyrics site, they want their annotating paradigm to be the norm with every web page you go to.
Unfortunately, for now, they are just a lyrics site... with annotations.
1. It's hard to read. Yellow or even white on black kills my eyes.
2. The "click" to translate" thing is really annoying & tough to read the full song. I feel like a side by side annotation would work better.
3. It's not as clean as other lyrics sites. Sure other ones are spammy - but they give me exactly what I'm looking for.
From a conceptual side of things - I really like what Rap Genius is trying to do. However, the little things like the ones I mentioned above make me looking for other alternatives.
Who cares how the guys act, they made a a great product that pulls in a strong majority of traffic for a given subject.
That's a lot more than most of the users here can say.
Not anymore now that Google brought the ranking hammer down on them.
I certainly found what they did distasteful. Their non-apology makes me lose tremendous respect for a company whose product I sincerely like and frequently use. As other people mentioned, they come off as whiny children -- "but Sally did it first!"
At the same time, I recognize that they might have just pulled off something really smart. If they had came out and said, "hey, Google, you should do something about our competition, they cheat" as a blog post, it might have got some attention but most people would write it off as "yea, who doesn't use SEO." Instead, they generated a publicity storm; provoked Google; then, pointed out that, to be consistent, everybody should be punished according to the severity of the offenses. RapGenius being the least severe offender comes out on top, and they still have the best product.
I am more inclined to believe they just fucked up than they actually thought about things from this game-theoretic perspective. Misquoting Hanlon's razor, "never attribute to genius that which can be adequately be explained by luck." Moreover, I don't know how much the loss of my respect and that of people like me will cost them, but as a startup it could be expensive.
Regardless, this has been fascinating to watch.
You can report them to Google here:
So, this is just a lie, right? The original thing on HN [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658] makes it pretty clear that they were asking for random links to Justin Bieber songs on any old blog post regardless of relevance. Or is Justin Bieber relevant to jmarbach's blog for some reason I'm missing? Also that they were hardly being selective about 'blogs whose content we think our followers will enjoy'.
So they're just plain lying, right?
[I _almost_ made a rap genius account for the purpose of annotating their statement to point this out. I might still do it, but the idea that they might find it gratifying that I created an account puts me off.]
The lesson to be learned here is that if they continue to intentionally behave in a childish manner like they have been (in interviews, emails, etc), it puts off a lot of people; a lot of the tech community. I'm seeing a lot of comments here which seem to put a lot of weight into their image (which is perceived to be negative) and that then affects people's opinions about whether they support or don't support RapGenius in this matter.
In short; quit being douchebags, it's not helping your case, your site, or your relationship with the community. All publicity is not good publicity.
Nope. Companies being in the news at all for any non-person-harming event is good. It's like display advertising to reinforce name recognition.
The name of the company is "rapgenius." They have a huge ambition, but they don't see how limited they are. Example: There's a radio station in Atlanta whose tagline is "All the hits, with none of the rap." (read: "none of that black music") They aren't a general purpose site. They are a rowdy manipulative bunch who are being stochastically abrasive in the hopes of finding a large enough group of people to like them.
Call it Lean Marketing: be loud and insulting as often as possible until you find enough of an exploitable niche where you fit in. (Turns out their first exploitable niche of "annotated rap lyrics" wasn't nearly big enough. They need more rubes to exploit now.)
Cause I'm young and I'm black and my hat's real low
Do I look like a mind reader sir, I don't know
Am I under arrest or should I guess some mo?
I thought snitching wasn't cool in the hip hop community?
Disclaimer: I use RapGenius every day and will continue to do so, unless they continue down this Metrolyrics-esque road.
In my experience the people who do these grey/black things just can't seem to flip that switch to producing value... they look for the angle, how they can parse the terms to their advantage and claim ignorance, and they cannot get out of "lawyer-think." You'll have a hard time convincing them they did anything wrong.
As for calling out their competitors, I actually don't have a problem with that. They're going to be under a microscope from now on and will otherwise be at a disadvantage. Their only reasonable course is to try to level the playing field.
Anyway, forgive the rant. I find these types of tactics gross and I'm glad they're getting penalized.
That is a flat out lie. Maybe it wasn't large scale, but this is exactly what they were doing by asking people to put the links back to their site to try to rank for Bieber lyrics.
Rap Genius has raised $15M from a group of premier investors including Andreesen Horowitz and yet their comps (according to Rap Genius, themselves!) are a bunch of black hat, spammy link farms containing music lyrics.
Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Say I am running a blog and I am asking my friends to include my blog link in everyone one of his links regardless what. And we are just doing this to get each other noticed. Say he's writing a C++ tutorial and I will also cook up a Python equivalent and say "hey guys if you want to check out the Python one, go check out my friend's blog here."
It's almost like me asking someone to promote my Youtube Channel (hey guys please subscribe X's new channel) in the video and in description.
As I said, I am asking my friend to link my Python's and I link his C++.
I can treat him a lunch when I get some ad revenue later. Or just a bro hug.
I understand it may not actually be showing what is happening here, but there is some gray area I want to explore.
I can also be a celebrity and every week I feature a couple links showing what my friends and my other celebrity friends are doing or writing or making. I may or may not get $$. Maybe just to be friendly (think Youtube, how channel owners help other owners...) Will that violate Google's ToS? I am famous and so helping a few people out shouldn't hurt, right?
the problem here is they are/were promoting a campaign in which they were asking you to specifically place "beiber" links on your blog, so that they get better page ranks in google.
you and you're buddy (or even a celebrity helping out their friend for free) are trying to share a particular link with your blogs viewers, and that single instance will probably not have a crazy effect on google page rank
RG is trying to game the system by getting bieber backlinks on a bunch of blogs in trade for a tweet...thats against googles rules
If I was investing in RG or advising them, I'd tell them to put a muzzle on it. They have a good product, stop screwing it up.
e.g. http://rapgenius.com/albums/09166007251-91-9166007251-marria...
I'm actually unbiased and prefer the alternative. When I'm looking for lyrics I just want lyrics and couldn't care less about the annotation. I'm not saying I'm the norm but saying the "norm" would always go for RapGenius is not fair, at least in my case.
Lessons learned: Better to be safe than sorry. Know your tools. Know your partners.
They must've been hacked.