Asking people to manually put links in their blog post doesn't seem scalable. In order to rank high for those keywords, you'll need many more backlinks than just a few blog posts.
Usually anything with the word 'hacking' in it means some worthless tripe the talentless toss back and forth to prove how they "get it." The root word is 'hack' as in bad writer, not 'hacking' as in coding.
Doesn't google penalize what they view as attempts to manipulate their algorithm through spamming and link trading. Couldn't this potentially backfire?
It's a set of many links in the bottom of a page, mostly unrelated to the main content of the post. This lights many red flags in the Google webspam metrics, I'm pretty sure.
I can only assume this would hurt them since the Panda update by Google a while back.
But more importantly:
Every instance of one-on-one communication I've seen by Rap Genius (this and the aphyr emails) include over-the-top frat boy style phrases. Are they being sarcastic, is it an affectation, or do they really speak like a parody of every "bro" ever?
I met them at YC's Work For A Startup day and they do in fact talk like that.
Fun quote from one of the cofounders:
>Mr. Ohanian asked the panel, “One of the things I see time and time again is that we have companies who went to the West Coast and then come screaming back to New York. What was the driving force to come back to New York?”
Rap Genius’ Ilan Zechory took the question first. “It’s where we lived,” he said. “It’s where our friends were. There are no women in the Bay Area, genuinely. We never considered moving out there. We always felt like our West Coast trips were, like, all of us in a Nissan Xterra, in like a Weston, with some weed, trying to steal bags of money to bring back to the East Coast.”
Well it is a hack, in the sense that it is the 1990 idea of hacking your Google rank. Nowadays, all this hack will accomplish is getting them downranked or banned altogether.
That was seriously painful to watch. From the host's hair, to the attempt at the rap genius guys trying to be "hip"... The entire thing feels like satire.
Because they make rape jokes and dress and talk like a bunch of narcissistic, conceited, swagtards.
3 founders, all wearing shades indoors. They're not movie stars and what they are doing is somewhat trivial yet they've trumped themselves up a new level with their sleezy tactics. All I can say is that gp invested in immaturity.
Rape jokes are contemptible enough, but their sense of fashion is not. It may be something that you personally appreciate, but you should not expect others to tailor their fashion sense to please you in particular.
I think the ridiculous outfit and antics is part of their shtick...I am sure they are aware that they look and act ridiculous.
If there is a point to criticize them on, it would be that they are making fun of rappers and rap/hip-hop culture, the same culture they are no doubt trying to appropriate to the tune of many millions I would guess.
Sacha does it for a noble cause, comedic effect and makes it obvious that he's not serious. These guys are not trying to be entertaining, they're profiteering through hidden agendas perpetrated on their too-dumb-to-realize-it-audience.
"it's not fashion sense when you're wearing shades indoors"
You had better believe that there is room in fashion for clothing without utility.
utmost disrespect."
Being able to be offended by somebody wearing sunglasses is a problem you are going to have to work on. The inability to tolerate the existence of those who are unlike you is a personal failing.
I don't need to validate an obvious facet of communication. When someone is wearing shades, their emotions are harder to read. It's a large form of insecurity on their part, not on mine. When you have three dudes, who are heads of the company, wearing sunglasses indoors, it shows a level of insecurity and immaturity. You can attempt to hide your eye contact through shades but everyone is going to know that you're not being straight. These guys are total tools. I have nothing to work on, I don't find it necessary to tolerate fools and people who find it cool to be disrespectful.
Wear sunglasses indoors and be an asshat, it isn't my problem. A basic facet of communication is to look at those you speak to in the eyes. Maybe you're too far nerd/asspergered or swag-frat to understand. It's alright, one day you'll cope with a thing called 'logic' and 'basic human decency.'
Asperger syndrome (AS), also known as Asperger disorder (AD) or simply Asperger's, is an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication.
A large majority of hackers have aspergers. A friend of mine, the famous hacker Captain Crunch, aka John Draper, is immensely talented yet has problems understanding normal human communication schemes.
It's possible that Crito has aspergers or is a swagtard like the Rap Genius guys. If he has aspergers, it's perfectly reasonable for him to not understand the point I'm making as his ability to pick up on nuances of human communication would be flawed.
In the swagtard case, he needs to defend his habit of wearing glasses indoors, otherwise his self-image would immensely suffer, and his ego would shatter. That's worse than death for those who judge themselves by their ability to be cool.
So how can you compare what I said to a rape joke? Nothing is humorous here, it's all very seriously logical.
Well the "swagtard" thing seems a little gauche, so I can understand why they're down-voting. But your point on the sunglasses is ridiculously obvious and it's pretty cringe-worthy that people are defending it as somehow not disrespectful and an obvious sign of arrogance.
I said swag-frat and somehow the reply convinces me that I said 'swagtard.' I'm not trying to insult retards, and it'd be pretty hard considering that it's a pretty factual condition in which brainpower is quite limited. There's nothing wrong with saying that people who place all their value in swag, aren't using their full brain power. If anything it's crude but not anywhere near a rape joke. Anyhow, the term was 'swag-frat' not swag-tard. And by that I meant the whole bro-be-cool culture of being stupid and dressing obnoxiously.
I'm still trying to work out if goldenkey is actually trolling us, or if he's actually incapable of seeing the irony of what he's saying...lol.
If he is actually serious:
Sorry, making retard jokes is not funny - heck, the term retard isn't even politically correct last time I checked - nor is making jokes about Asperger's syndrome funny...
Still, unlike you, I don't really care if you make jokes I consider unfunny shrugs. Each to their own.
However, it is called "hypocrisy" when you manage to inappropriately insult two minority groups in the process of calling somebody else out for being inappropriate.
Here is the thing: I don't. That you think I must is extremely telling however.
I just don't have trouble grappling with the concept of people who are unlike myself. It is not hard for me to conceive of people who dress unlike me for non-utilitarian reasons. That is what fashion is. Further, I don't have to subscribe to a particular fashion to recognize those fashions for what they are; fashions.
Who is really too far "nerd/asspergered" here (seriously, your comments are so steeped in irony it is absurd...)? The person who cannot comprehend that fashion is not about utility and cannot stand those who are unlike him? Or the person who calling that intolerant, fashion-ignorant, bullshit.
Fashion is about more than utility. Your particular way of dressing is not the best way of dressing; stop dreaming up pop-psych self-aggrandizing bullshit to make yourself feel superior. Not everyone who calls you on your shit participates in the fashion trends which you vilify. Grow up.
It's not fashion to wear glasses indoors. It's borderline retarded. Let's move the setting, you're having dinner with someone. They are wearing sunglasses. Any reasonable person will say, 'hey can you take those fucking things off, I'm trying to talk to you'
"The inability to tolerate the existence of those who are unlike you is a personal failing."
That's kind of ironic, since you can't seem to get over the fact that someone, unlike you, considers the RG founders douchebags. See how sophistry works both ways?
Look, I think sunglasses indoors are a silly thing, but then I probably think the same thing about a lot of fashion.
But then, as my wife says, I have terrible dress sense...lol.
It's fashion - you don't need to get it (and I certainly don't). It's a subjective thing, so to each their own.
And to go on about how they're "douchenozzles" (is that even a word?), or their "boorish debauchery" sounds like you're just looking to be offended.
It doesn't harm you directly how these guy dress, or how Justin Bieber dresses, or does his hair, so I don't see the point of working myself into a sweat over it.
Justin Bieber is not a technical cofounder, he's a kidbob singer. These guys have the responsibility to represent their company technically, and are throwing a mad fork in it.
Being founders, they also have the responsibility to connect with their audience. Rap Genius is a music site, so it's not a bad idea for the founders to emulate the antics of the musicians that create the material people go to Rap Genius to see. You can call it unconventional, but you can't say they don't know their audience.
And while we're all sitting here debating whether Rap Genius is "baller or no, y'all", they're probably sitting around thinking "Gee, I have this giant pile of $50 million. Gosh, I wonder what all those people lurking on HN think about us? I had best find out!".
Actually, quite frankly, I don't think they give two cents what we say about them...lol.
But even money aside, they've managed to actually accomplish something tangible, so for that they have my respect.
Just because funding was accomplished doesn't mean they aren't slimy underlings. In fact, given that you mention merely finance, you should acknowledge that funding is totally disparate of their ethics.
You do realize they're probably just sending up the genre, right?
So while we're sitting around going "OMG!!! What a bunch of douches!!!", they're sitting on $15 million and thinking...actually I don't think they really even care what we think...lol.
When I saw that video, it was obviously a send-up.
See this - their interview with Ben Horowitz from February 2013:
I have no idea why, but these guys seem to invoke HN-fury like no other...lol.
Personally I don't even like rap music, and I can't stand people like that (whether they're putting it on or not), but I have to tip my hat to these guys, they're smart, driven, they have capital and they've actually gone out and accomplished something.
I assume you mean Quora, because I know at Stack Exchange we were religious about doing everything the right way.
I think Google cares more about the user experience (how bad is it if a user ends up on this page after searching) than the exact letter of the law. The truly sleazy sites usually do badly on both metrics though.
He most certainly means Quora, which because of it's dark patterns I refuse to visit even when it ranks. Stack Exchange on the other hand, has another google problem. Many of the top results are "closed as blah blah blah" -- so you arrive from google to a Stack Exchange page which has your exact question, excitedly you click, only to find it closed and unanswered.
Could SE improve that by generating a sitemap that de-emphasizes closed questions? IIRC Google gives the option to control the relative weighting of various pages without deindexing them entirely. (Although maybe a sitemap on the scale of SO would be problematic in some way? I've certainly never tried to create one that large.)
There's no size problem. Each sitemap file can contain up to 50,000 urls. Google's cache on SO's sitemap.xml file shows 126 files (maxing at 6.3 million urls (50k * 126); their site claims 6.33 million questions at the moment, so it all appears to roughly add up).
I've run sites with millions of urls spread across a lot of sitemaps, and Google will devour them without any fundamental problems. I found it wasn't uncommon for Google to regularly screwup the indexing of a few sitemap files out of a hundred or whatever, and often it would randomly fail to update a % of sitemaps in a timely fashion.
Yeah closed and unanswered should definitely be delisted. These kinds of questions usually have negative votes so they do have a lower score in the sitemap weight but I am not sure how much emphasis G gives that.
I will forward this on for SE to think about improving.
I think it's a more basic problem. You find exactly the question you have, but SO decided the question was 'wrong' somehow.
The question may not be answerable, but it doesn't make the question wrong. The question is nothing more than an expression of the users query or intent.
For example, unanswerable questions could give a stack listing if relevant answerable questions.
But it just seems wrong to take highly targeted inbound traffic and send them to a page which basically says 'nothing to see here'.
> These kinds of questions usually have negative votes
Or, quite often, substantial positive votes, and the wails of a legion of users protesting the closing. I would guess that that kind of question is more likely to be the target of enough inbound links to lift it into the search results people actually see.
Marking closed, zero- or negative-voted questions as noindex might be a good move, though.
So presumably they are going to keep a list of all those pages they tweeted out so that when their organic rank falls into the depths they can then email back all those people and say "please take down that page you put up with those links on it."
That will be particularly true when someone's random blog has a bunch of links to Bieber lyrics on it.
There was a post a bit back (which you might be referencing) about almost this exact situation, except it was about black hat SEO dramatically backfiring. Specifically, businesses were asking bloggers and news sites to delete spam comments that linked back to the sites.
The HTML that Mahbod wants you to paste looks pretty similar to what those spam comments were like...
There's still Disallow in Google Webmaster Tools as a solution for bad back links, either done by an "enemy", old agency or previous stupid SEO manager
> There was a post a bit back (which you might be referencing) about almost this exact situation, except it was about black hat SEO dramatically backfiring. Specifically, businesses were asking bloggers and news sites to delete spam comments that linked back to the sites.
This strategy is total fail, Google specifically targeted this stuff with Penguin, which is a relatively old update by now. Combine the scaled approach with posts like this and the fact that Matt Cutts hangs around HN = likely won't end well for them.
How can people conduct business like a bad impression of Tom Haverford from Parks and Rec? I think I have too much Ron Swanson in me to take anyone that pushes me like that seriously.
This seems like a bad idea. Google is increasingly good at detecting and punishing unnatural links. This type of tactic is not something I would recommend; search optimization in 2013 is different than it used to be.
It'd be fascinating to track this list over time - see how quickly the blackhat seo works, and now that Matt's on the case, just how quickly the Google banhammer falls…
it's neither of those, but if you had to say on which side it is tilting, then I would say black hat. It's obvious that he's using Google tricks (get good backlinks to get a higher pagerank). That's not white hat SEO at all.
This isn't really SEO (i.e. "Optimization" ). It's trying to "hack" search engine traffic artificially. Sure it may be a "legit" move made by many SEO companies, but dumb manipulation like this screws up search for all of us.
Where's Matt Cutts? Any comments on this? This is obviously a departure form create great content that others will organically link to. I'd argue that this is just a step above Fiverr SEO.
224 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6957463
That will be my preferred business salutation going forward.
RapGenius is cool, people share it. Azlyrics is not cool. (In my best Justin Timberlake voice)
It is basically a variation of:
"Excessive link exchanges ("Link to me and I'll link to you") or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking"
plus
"Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links"
Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
To google, this is a one way (non-reciprocal; read: "more valuable") link in RG's favor.
But more importantly:
Every instance of one-on-one communication I've seen by Rap Genius (this and the aphyr emails) include over-the-top frat boy style phrases. Are they being sarcastic, is it an affectation, or do they really speak like a parody of every "bro" ever?
Fun quote from one of the cofounders:
>Mr. Ohanian asked the panel, “One of the things I see time and time again is that we have companies who went to the West Coast and then come screaming back to New York. What was the driving force to come back to New York?”
Rap Genius’ Ilan Zechory took the question first. “It’s where we lived,” he said. “It’s where our friends were. There are no women in the Bay Area, genuinely. We never considered moving out there. We always felt like our West Coast trips were, like, all of us in a Nissan Xterra, in like a Weston, with some weed, trying to steal bags of money to bring back to the East Coast.”
"Brainy Smurf, can you smurf me that SERP with some growth smurfing?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo
http://aphyr.com/media/recruiters/rapgenius.txt
Link to HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6904224
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMmdl4VltD4
3 founders, all wearing shades indoors. They're not movie stars and what they are doing is somewhat trivial yet they've trumped themselves up a new level with their sleezy tactics. All I can say is that gp invested in immaturity.
Furthermore, it's easier to be a douchenozzle with shades on, because eye contact tends to make one more susceptible to the crowd's feelings.
If there is a point to criticize them on, it would be that they are making fun of rappers and rap/hip-hop culture, the same culture they are no doubt trying to appropriate to the tune of many millions I would guess.
Their tactic may not be to your liking but they aren't the first to adopt characters as a way to promote their business.
As I said, the critic I have of them is that they're slily indulging in stereotypes and I am surprised they haven't been called out on that.
You had better believe that there is room in fashion for clothing without utility.
utmost disrespect."
Being able to be offended by somebody wearing sunglasses is a problem you are going to have to work on. The inability to tolerate the existence of those who are unlike you is a personal failing.
Wear sunglasses indoors and be an asshat, it isn't my problem. A basic facet of communication is to look at those you speak to in the eyes. Maybe you're too far nerd/asspergered or swag-frat to understand. It's alright, one day you'll cope with a thing called 'logic' and 'basic human decency.'
A large majority of hackers have aspergers. A friend of mine, the famous hacker Captain Crunch, aka John Draper, is immensely talented yet has problems understanding normal human communication schemes.
It's possible that Crito has aspergers or is a swagtard like the Rap Genius guys. If he has aspergers, it's perfectly reasonable for him to not understand the point I'm making as his ability to pick up on nuances of human communication would be flawed.
In the swagtard case, he needs to defend his habit of wearing glasses indoors, otherwise his self-image would immensely suffer, and his ego would shatter. That's worse than death for those who judge themselves by their ability to be cool.
So how can you compare what I said to a rape joke? Nothing is humorous here, it's all very seriously logical.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6957590
It's silly to think I'm going to offend retards, most would not care in the least about some minor point on HN, let alone understand it.
What the hell is the point of flat out lying if you aren't even going to edit your past comments to support your lie?
Go troll elsewhere on the internet.
Wait, what?
If he is actually serious:
Sorry, making retard jokes is not funny - heck, the term retard isn't even politically correct last time I checked - nor is making jokes about Asperger's syndrome funny...
Still, unlike you, I don't really care if you make jokes I consider unfunny shrugs. Each to their own.
However, it is called "hypocrisy" when you manage to inappropriately insult two minority groups in the process of calling somebody else out for being inappropriate.
Here is the thing: I don't. That you think I must is extremely telling however.
I just don't have trouble grappling with the concept of people who are unlike myself. It is not hard for me to conceive of people who dress unlike me for non-utilitarian reasons. That is what fashion is. Further, I don't have to subscribe to a particular fashion to recognize those fashions for what they are; fashions.
Who is really too far "nerd/asspergered" here (seriously, your comments are so steeped in irony it is absurd...)? The person who cannot comprehend that fashion is not about utility and cannot stand those who are unlike him? Or the person who calling that intolerant, fashion-ignorant, bullshit.
Fashion is about more than utility. Your particular way of dressing is not the best way of dressing; stop dreaming up pop-psych self-aggrandizing bullshit to make yourself feel superior. Not everyone who calls you on your shit participates in the fashion trends which you vilify. Grow up.
That's kind of ironic, since you can't seem to get over the fact that someone, unlike you, considers the RG founders douchebags. See how sophistry works both ways?
But then, as my wife says, I have terrible dress sense...lol.
It's fashion - you don't need to get it (and I certainly don't). It's a subjective thing, so to each their own.
And to go on about how they're "douchenozzles" (is that even a word?), or their "boorish debauchery" sounds like you're just looking to be offended.
It doesn't harm you directly how these guy dress, or how Justin Bieber dresses, or does his hair, so I don't see the point of working myself into a sweat over it.
Actually, quite frankly, I don't think they give two cents what we say about them...lol.
But even money aside, they've managed to actually accomplish something tangible, so for that they have my respect.
What they are doing is not trivial at all. They managed to raise $15 million for a very simple idea, that is pretty hard to do.
http://i.imgur.com/OOA8QzF.jpg
Just because funding was accomplished doesn't mean they aren't slimy underlings. In fact, given that you mention merely finance, you should acknowledge that funding is totally disparate of their ethics.
So while we're sitting around going "OMG!!! What a bunch of douches!!!", they're sitting on $15 million and thinking...actually I don't think they really even care what we think...lol.
When I saw that video, it was obviously a send-up.
See this - their interview with Ben Horowitz from February 2013:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpvrWdfEUHg
Compare the two videos - notice something?
I have no idea why, but these guys seem to invoke HN-fury like no other...lol.
Personally I don't even like rap music, and I can't stand people like that (whether they're putting it on or not), but I have to tip my hat to these guys, they're smart, driven, they have capital and they've actually gone out and accomplished something.
Google doesn't seem to care if you're big enough.
I think Google cares more about the user experience (how bad is it if a user ends up on this page after searching) than the exact letter of the law. The truly sleazy sites usually do badly on both metrics though.
I've run sites with millions of urls spread across a lot of sitemaps, and Google will devour them without any fundamental problems. I found it wasn't uncommon for Google to regularly screwup the indexing of a few sitemap files out of a hundred or whatever, and often it would randomly fail to update a % of sitemaps in a timely fashion.
I will forward this on for SE to think about improving.
The question may not be answerable, but it doesn't make the question wrong. The question is nothing more than an expression of the users query or intent.
For example, unanswerable questions could give a stack listing if relevant answerable questions.
But it just seems wrong to take highly targeted inbound traffic and send them to a page which basically says 'nothing to see here'.
Or, quite often, substantial positive votes, and the wails of a legion of users protesting the closing. I would guess that that kind of question is more likely to be the target of enough inbound links to lift it into the search results people actually see.
Marking closed, zero- or negative-voted questions as noindex might be a good move, though.
>Did you post it??? how about this: attach the HTML to THIS article and I'll tweet this out for you - that would be META!
Named as the same guy as the email exchange, Mahbod.
[0] http://jmarbach.com/rapgenius-growth-hack-exposed#comment-11...
That will be particularly true when someone's random blog has a bunch of links to Bieber lyrics on it.
The HTML that Mahbod wants you to paste looks pretty similar to what those spam comments were like...
I believe that would be this great write up on the current situation: http://www.theawl.com/2013/12/the-new-spammer-panic
#1 - Justin Bieber All Bad Lyrics
#1 - Justin Bieber Confident Lyric
#1 - Justin Bieber Heartbreaker Lyrics
#1 - Justin Bieber Memphis Lyrics
#1 - Justin Bieber One Life Lyrics
#2 - Justin Bieber All That Matters Lyrics
#2 - Justin Bieber Hold Tight Lyrics
#2 - Justin Bieber Pyd Lyrics
#3 - Justin Bieber Change Me Lyrics
#3 - Justin Bieber Recovery Lyrics
#4 - Justin Bieber Bad Day Lyrics
#5 - Justin Bieber Roller Coaster Lyrics
#7 - Justin Bieber Lyrics
Source: serpscan.com
wow, google must have been super impressed ;)
Where's Matt Cutts? Any comments on this? This is obviously a departure form create great content that others will organically link to. I'd argue that this is just a step above Fiverr SEO.