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> The moment Google plays favorites manually is the moment I switch to another search engine.

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.

Certainly google has a right to tweak their algorithms as they choose which leads to editorial choices but to manually override a serp to place a site in a position regardless of their behavior crosses a line.

I think Google manual overriding a serp in this case is the way to get the best possible search result. Being at the top of the page shouldn't be about how many links were bought, it should be about quality of content.

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.

Bob's lyric site is way better than Rap Genius. His should definitely be on top. He's also a pretty cool guy.

> 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.

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.

"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. "

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.

The legit strategies you are suggesting require that you have a significant value add to offer. If that is the case your best bet is to ignore search engine traffic altogether - be happy when you get it but don't care when you don't get it.

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.

This post is a day old, but I wanted to add this in in case others think that Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal) has not been penalized: http://moz.com/blog/widgetbait-gone-wild

"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!

Thanks for the link. What a great discussion from the old seomoz days...

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.

Google definitely plays favorites. It is written in to how PageRank works. Some sites are Trusted manually. The distance from those sites is your Page Rank Flow.

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.

Exactly. Look I get it, we are engineers who like logical rules that are applied evenly and without exceptions... But google already does tweak things, so "integrity" is IMO a weird concept to apply to SERPs.