Read the article.
They are back because they did a lot of work finding all these bad links and using Google’s disavowal tool to kill them, not because of their VC funding or whatever other influence you think they have on Google.
They are back because they did a lot of work finding all these bad links and using Google’s disavowal tool to kill them, not because of their VC funding or whatever other influence you think they have on Google.
Removing 200 links out of nearly 200,000 links in a holiday week is not a lot of work. In fact, Google has told others waiting to be reconsidered that the wait time is multiple weeks. https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/statuses/418734227228606464
Further, some sites which submitted reconsideration requests before RapGenius was penalized have not received a response. And in many such cases those other sites:
had far fewer links, removed a far greater quantity of links, disavowed a far greater quantity of links & were involved in something that was nowhere near as overt/intentional on the behalf of the webmaster (I've seen cases where the notices came after a payday loan hacker mixed in someone else's sites with their own links to create cover for their work)
They got 200 webmasters to remove their links, a few didn't, and the rest ended up being "site scrapers" who steal other people's sites. They just added those to disavow. Seems like they acted very quickly to rectify every suspicious link they could find.
But yes, they got special treatment in having the manual penalty removed after only a few days. But it's a legitimately popular site. You'd expect Google to do that since its harming Google's own users during the penalty.
There is no such thing as fairness. It's a paradigm of the feeble minded. Most likely a defense mechanism - "look guys, he cheated on the exam, let's tell the teacher!".
If no, please explain.
If yes, an important follow up on that front: how dystopian is it that the company in charge of organizing information requires spreading misinformation to succeed?