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Very childish indeed, it was not an apology at all but a 'they're doing it too' kind of post. I've seen this type of childish behavior on a couple occasions with them (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo )... I'm quite surprised they decided take this approach.

Edit: mirror, since I'm betting the text will be modified soon considering the reactions here. http://pastebin.com/dMh7dgxp

Childishness seems ingrained in this company's DNA.

I voted for this in the new q becuz I wanted them to get burned

Who, HackerNews'?? It's always so funny when people insult someone and assume the rest of us will know what they are talking about instead of assuming your comments apply to yourself.

It didn't take a whole lot of critical thinking to figure out what company he was talking about.

There's a fine line between being a performance artist and a douchebag.

Other than that, i have no concerns.

a textbook examples of the dreaded "bro-grammer"

You are very misinformed if you think these strategies do not work. They are a necessity for a startup in very high competition niches.

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.

Although I don't agree that "What Rapgenius is doing is very innocent", I do have to agree on the general (black) SEO tactics that startups do, and even blue chips do.

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.cat

I didn't say buying links doesn't work. I said asking for a series of exact match anchor text links, on the bottom of a blog post on a site that is likely irrelevant, is very unlikely to work.

More 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...

You're giving Google's algorithms way too much credit. The exact strategy you described still does work--and that's really the sad part.

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.

My experience differs. Odds are, even with all those spammy links, there are thousands of legit links. Many of those links are probably discounted by Google.

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

While you're right, doesn't it scare anyone else that your entire business can be at the whim of Googles algorithms and decisions? :(

> In my experience Google has never penalized a competitor for doing this in my niche,

Just checking but have you reported the competitors?

Is there a legitimate way to "tattle" on competitors that are blatantly abusing SEO practices?

Sure, here is the link. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1

You can report them using Google Webmaster tools. I have done this for several sites, but the link buying & ranking within Google continues. The system is broken.

Well, not including the link you wanted to boost in the first place is a good start.

it's not about right or wrong, good or bad.

it's about traffic. thus spake zara.

You would have them be "penalized up the wazoo" because they didn't apologize in the way you would have preferred? Talk about being unreasonably punitive. I would hope that making an example out of somebody is not a formal strategy in search engine ranking. Instead, be rational and penalize them in proportion to the degree to which they cheat, just like everyone else.

No, I would penalize them for building spammy backlinks the same way Google penalized their own chrome site.

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.

I didn't see any inference from OP that because of this apology the site should be penalized. Perhaps OP thinks that the extremely shady spam tactics the site clearly uses in themselves deserve penalization up the wazoo.

> 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?

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

There's always a choice, but in this case... They chose WRONG. Their strategy most likely wouldnt even work if they didnt get caught. lots of exact match anchor text links around content that is completely irrelevant at the bottom of a blog post, without social sharing matching their backlink profile. (yes, search engines can look at your social sharing pattern with your backlinks and see if something is getting artificial backlinks.)

They chose the short long way... They should have chosen the long short way.

This site should be penalized up the wazoo.

Can we get them banned on HN? NSA-level penalized? Insta-dead?

Since Rap Genius is a YC company, that is unlikely.

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

Does anybody else see the folly in letting a corporation with their own agenda run a real time news site?

Does anyone else see the folly in patronizing a news site if you think the news reported is untrustworthy?

What do you mean, "Letting a corporation run...?" You don't "let" someone run a site they created.

In fairness, the articles submitted from the domain rapgenius.com are appropriate for HN. (e.g. the Heroku incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5215884 )

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.)

Eh, as long as HN doesn't censor bad press on its startups (I don't know, maybe they do?) I'm fine with it.

"Letting"? You didn't have to come here.

I'm pretty sure that that is a sarcastic comment...

In other words, schadenfreude > public good