Should RapGenius be able to "negotiate" with Matt Cutts and Google?
I started my tech career working in Adwords Sales and Sales Operations at Google. One of the biggest complaints we received was our clients needed help getting ahold of someone regarding SEO problems. Of course, there was little we could do on the paid side - which was Google's policy.
The whole point of Google's ranking algorithm is to keep it as much of a black box as possible with even Jason Calacanis getting nowhere with his Mahalo battle with Matt Cutts and team.
I'm uncomfortable with what appears to be almost a direct line the RapGenius gents have with the Google team to come to what they've coined as a "resolution" between the two entities.
With thousands of other sites being unable to get ahold of a human being at Google to resolve SEO problems, do you think RapGenius should have the ability to negotiate with Google? Do they have enough traffic to justify the conversation? Should that matter?
96 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadNeed to protect the user by ensuring fairness, IMHO.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/disclosure/
I'm torn on whether or not there should be a more formal process or they should just keep it completely locked up.
http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pag...
There's still a conflict of interest, and it is possible he is giving his interests more leniency.
It ain't broke, don't fix it.
No.
> Do they have enough traffic to justify the conversation
Yes, maybe.
> I'm uncomfortable with what appears to be almost a direct line the RapGenius gents have with the Google team to come to what they've coined as a "resolution" between the two entities.
So am I.
In the past I have seen Google responding and resolving penalization with some sites, where in the problem lay in the internally, with intentional/unintentional shady practices.
I have no problems with this.
But RG took some of their activities to a whole different level, one that I have seen before by blackhat marketers only. Just like I would not expect blackhat marketers to get away with it, I would not like Google or any other search engine to open doors to the possibility of people who got caught to have an easy out.
Maintaining neutrality and upholding previously established best practices would also be fair to any new start-ups that may want to enter the lyrics space.
I'd like a direct response from someone in charge from Google. Why, and how, are the RG guys getting 1 on 1 support?
Funny how most of the ways to get a response involve causing a scene to get attention for an answer.
On a slightly different note, it doesn't seem right for Google to intervene with specific companies' page rankings. Although Google isn't breaking laws, the "black box" type of generic algorithm seems more ethical. Rather than favoring individual groups/sites/corporations, I think Google should maintain credibility by encompassing all rules, regulations, and penalties within one algorithm. Search engine results shouldn't be subjective.
1. Their black SEO practice around Justin Bibier as they call themselves RapGenius (LOL)
2. Those are the guys we're talking about. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo (show me love ...yes)
3. They were 100% illegal, beside the big investment they got, they didn't pay copyrighters for using their lyrics. http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/11/13/rap_genius_co...
Now that said, why the hell someone like Google has to negotiate with them ?
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I get the sense that HN feels like these penalties are a rare thing; this type of ranking penalty is happening to an absurd amount of websites every day. If you were to rank the number of websites that received a manual penalty from Google on the same day as RapGenius by amount of traffic, my guess would be RapGenius wouldn't be in the top 10. They're not in a position to "negotiate" with Google, and Google doesn't "negotiate." They slap your wrist when they find you doing something dirty, and you try to recover your reputation. The only reason Google would try to work with RapGenius would be because of the PR RapGenius can generate, which appears to be happening, but there's no way they will just remove the penalty. My guess is at best RapGenius will get an expedited path to have the same options as any other site owner.
The only recourse a website owner has when they have received a manual penalty is to disavow bad links, and hope that somehow they've identified all of the bad links in their link disavow. This is a nefarious process for even the best of SEOs, and the process is quite poor; I've even discussed this with Matt Cutts in the past, but it's understandable considering the scale Google has to deal with. You can't exactly have people taking phone calls. And in Google's defense, they only penalize you if you were trying something sketchy anyway, so it's your fault for playing with fire (except in the case of negative SEO, but that's another discussion).
That said, while this ban will hurt RapGenius in the short-term, the penalty likely won't last forever. And considering that it doesn't appear that they're monetizing, it's not like they're losing revenue, just traffic for a short-term. Penalties like this, if properly disavowed, usually last about 30 days.
Interestingly enough, I'm unsure how much the SEO spam would have helped RapGenius in the first place; all of the links would have had the exact same anchor text, which raises some red flags for Rap Genius. I'm not sure of the kind of scale they were trying to hit with the blogs, but it was likely either 1. Not going to move the needle or 2. Become so big it would hurt them. Even disregarding ethics of anti-black-hat SEO, it really was just a poor move on the part of Rap Genius SEO-wise.
"Move fast and break stuff" can come back and bite you sometimes, but I'm confident RapGenius will figure it out in the end.
TC article: http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/
"Update: Rap Genius’ founders have provided this statement, indicating they’re working with Google on being returned to better search result rankings:
... (statement from RapGenius talking about resolution)
"Looks like Rap Genius and Google might come to some compromise where Google restores at least some of the startup’s search result ranking juice in exchange for it cleaning up its act. However, at least some of the decreased visibility is likely to stick around for a long time, impeding Rap Genius’ business. We’ll have more details on the outcome of the talks as soon as possible and we are awaiting a response from Google."
As I tweeted to Josh on Twitter[1] this actually happens to all sites once they've got themselves out of a penalty and the Google Algorithms trust the site again.
[1] https://twitter.com/profitbaron/status/415918373575213056
I doubt there's any sort of quid pro quo going on here.
That could easily mean "We are using the tools Google provide to everyone to fix our stuff" but by phrasing it the way they did they make themselves seem important because
A) They are working "with" Google (Like an equal)
B) They are important because Google is paying attention to them.
I sincerely hope what they have written is just hyperbole and the reality is they are not getting any special help.
I would get pretty frustrated and angry in that situation, and given that Rapgenius' founders seem to be pretty immature, they are probably extremely angry. So...
I wonder if there is a "nuclear option" for Rapgenius they can threaten Google with. What could they do that would create so much damage that it would force Google to move (possibly at expense of Rapgenius' business)?
Throw their entire capital into a probably fruitless lawsuit? Create fake sites and spend all the money on SEO, then litter Google's search results (but not Bing's) with obscenities? Hire old fashioned thugs to clean up the Googleplex? Get together with other disgruntled people and start a dirt campaign?
(I guess I have an unhealthy fascination for evil (rap-)genius schemes...)
Clearly they should join forces with those anti-gentrification protesters that keep smashing the Google bus windows.
It's a reasonable conclusion for searchers to make that RapGenius doesn't exist anymore because they doesn't exist on Google, just like it's reasonable to assume that businesses removed from the Yellow Pages doesn't exist anymore.
https://twitter.com/ReesesPiece94/status/415939402422947840
https://twitter.com/Mattious_/status/415913576507772928
https://twitter.com/Pouss_Mouss/status/415913988556201984
People who search for RapGenius on Google will find plenty of information that indicates that they are a live company, so that would be ludicrous on its face.
With Google sitting on billions in cash, I don't see how any frivolous lawsuit that RapGenius could afford to pursue without committing suicide would force them to move.
> It's a reasonable conclusion for searchers to make that RapGenius doesn't exist anymore because they doesn't exist on Google
They do exist on Google. If you search for them, there is plenty of information about them.
Sure, you won't get a direct link to their site, but there is plenty of evidence that they exist that Google provides, including explanations of why the direct link doesn't appear. (E.g., for me right now, the first result if I search for "Rap Genius" is a news result with a time of "3 hours ago" titled "Google punishes Rap Genius for manipulative SEO tactics".
I don't think that anyone would reasonably conclude from that the RapGenius doesn't exist any more.
you know what's absurd? That people still believe that it would be impossible for Google to set up some support lines. They make over 10billion dollars per year in pure profit for heavens sake, and have the belief of the public market investors behind them. It should be clear now that the feigned impracticality of the support lines is simply a ruse to maximize profits.
It's not just that they can penalize other companies, and competitors (wheter they have a "legitimate" reason or not). They can make people's ideas, political positions, etc. essentially disappear.
A stupid example: If they wanted to oppress trade unions, they could penalize every page with information about unions when someone searches for "workers' rights". More likely, they could work with oppressive governments to remove certain unpleasant historical events from people's sight.
I wonder why the European Union doesn't do anything... they used to be very strict about antitrust laws, privacy, etc.. Probably someone has to step up and sue Google for them to get active. I could think of a few things they could do here.
- One is to force Google to make their rankings more transparent.
- Google could have offer a kind of appeals process if a manual penalty is applied.
- The EU could put a special tax on the market leader, which would fund a subsidy for promising competitors. (Google's European office is currently registered in a low tax haven in Ireland.)
None of this is without precedent, but there would have to be the right political intent to get something like this started.
And before someone says Google is not in the EU's jurisdiction: Europe is a huge market. They have already fought antitrust trials with Microsoft, and MS could have said "screw you guys" and stopped doing business here, but instead they paid their penalties, because anything else would have been crazy. And if the EU is not going to do it, there are very self-conscious governments in Brazil, China, and India that might put pressure on Google & co..
(OTOH, we know that Governments like monopolists like Google when they help them censor and surpress information, but that's a different topic.)
That's been obvious for the better part of a decade now. People will scream bloody murder, and not without good cause, but it's either going to happen, or there's no point in even pretending to regulate public utility monopolies.
You can always use one of dozens of other search engines.
That won't help Google any more than it helped Microsoft.
I'd love to see the comparison as to how Microsoft's strong-arming of VARs to sell only their products and Google's penalizing RG for attempting to subvert their search engine rankings relate.
Put another way: exactly what about Google could they (practically) regulate and will have sufficient public support?
In essence the problem tis about Google being able to wield disproportionate power through it's rankings and our common sense telling us that they will eventually abuse this if left unchecked; but that they aren't abusing this too blatantly just yet.
Not that that's of any help for people like my friend who ran a (handwritten) long tail content generation company which worked hard to stay within Google's guidelines yet had the company he and 3 friends had worked on for 4 years destroyed overnight just months ago when someone at Google decided they didn't like the content and penalized every single one of his clients.
They've been tailoring search results to cut out the specialized aggregators, like including their own shopping results above other stores.
The obvious one you've probably seen recently is movies. They now show the actors, related films and rankings, depriving views and ad space from the sites that offered that information.
They've also been doing it with maps for years for search terms like 'x in y city' as well as entering the ratings business. This content is often poor, but I imagine every click into an aggregator is a loss to google as the ad spend potentially goes on that aggregator instead of google.
You could see all of these are attempting to circumvent other businesses and abusing their monopoly. But I imagine none of these businesses want to complain as to be shut out of Google on the internet is death. You can't tell google to not steal your content, without telling them to not list your content.
They seem to justify it with claims that they're just giving searchers what they want, but in the end they own the highways, and now they seem to be putting their own facades up in front of a significant number of the businesses along the highway too which means they have to advertise on google just to get above google's own internal adverts.
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting, but actual search results often seem to appear a very, very long way down the page on a lot of terms these days.
If I want the weather in a city I'm visiting, why wouldn't I want it on the google page, instead of another click away?
The rest of the Internet has no natural right to views and clicks sent their way from google. If google gives users the best search results (among the more than half-dozen credible search engines), users will use them. Do enough hostile things to users and users will go elsewhere. If their competition improves while they stay stagnant, they will also start to lose market share.
Google is improving Google's offering. That's laudable, because it helps Google's users and Google's financials.
It also becomes more apparent within their Webmaster Guidelines[4] that, they do not like bad SEO.
You can easily use all of that knowledge to figure it out.
They do. It's called a reconsideration request[5] That would actually discourage anyone from making a decent product. Why? Well if you make a good one people will use it, you will become market leader and you will receive a special tax.[1] http://www.youtube.com/GoogleWebmasterHelp
[2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/70897?hl=en#3
[3] https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/insidesearch/howsearchwork...
[4] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
[5] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en
They should care about delivering the best quality search results to their users, and nothing else. As a user, I don't give a crap about SEO or link farming ethics or anything else. That stuff is Google's problem. By penalizing what is (reportedly) the best lyrics site, Google has made their problem my problem.
A fair page ranking system would be entirely transparent, rigidly enforced, and not "punitive." Should they delist RapGenius for breaking the rules? Sure, if the rules themselves provide for that outcome. But the second the infraction is corrected, the penalty should end, and the site should be restored to its proper rank.
Google is not a government agency. The more they act like one, the more people will treat them like one. Believe me, they aren't going to like where that road goes.
[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
[2] https://twitter.com/profitbaron/status/415918373575213056
The penalty is applied until, the site fall backs into the Google Guidelines[3]. Google actually helps Webmasters to get their site back in line with their guidelines through informing them what type of penalty[4] it is. For instance, if it is a link penalty like Rap Genius has, Google shows example links within Webmaster Tools (usually 3 of them) to provide insight, on links which Google considers to be falling outside of those guidelines.
However, the links which are going to be affecting Rap Genius were predominantly because of the "tweet-for-links" system, the identification and removal of links should be relatively quick and straightforward.
[1] http://searchengineland.com/90-days-later-google-lets-j-c-pe...
[2] http://searchengineland.com/interflora-gets-google-rankings-...
[3] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
[4] https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/2604771?hl=en&re...
What? That's silly. Then a competitor offering not that would start to take a foothold the way Google took its foothold from the existing giants....In fact, it is happening right now with things like http://leap2.com/ or https://duckduckgo.com/. If you're concerned about the size of that competition, then I'd remind you that Google didn't exist even 16 years ago. Which means there is plenty of chance for a small company to come up and start eating Google's lunch in areas they've lost their way. (I think search is actually one of the big ones)
At some point, the giant corporations just have too much for a startup to defeat. That's why most startups are basically picking off one little part and then the corporations buy them. It used to be that NEW technology was where startups were able to expand while old players couldn't adapt fast enough. For example, Microsoft was still small when the PC software revolution came about. However, now with "moonshots" and ambitious VC activity, the corporations have set up quite a few obstacles to that happening anymore.
even if it's not with governments, it's with other corporations
People arn't rational, and even if google is filtering out political sites performing propaganda through omission, there will be a huge population of people that either wouldn't hear about it, or wouldn't care.
The free market doesn't fix everything.
The fear is "just google it" becoming synonymous with search - even if that search occurs on Bing, etc.
I have tried to search for where leap2 are getting their results from without finding anything substantial. There is fluff about "living search engine", "social search engine" and a few others. I find no evidence for (or against) that they have their own full Internet search engine.
The problem for new companies trying to take on Google is the immenseness of their infrastructure. Lets say you want to start your own search engine.
You have a great idea, some idea for your crawler, etc. Given that you dont have 10 000s of servers to store and run distributed searches etc you are at a great disadvantage. Can you do it with 5 servers in the cloud? How much space does one complete index of the entire internet take now?
Back when Google started, their hardware was modest.
If Google persists in it's arrogant "fuck you, we are the great untouchable Google" attitude, the gloves are going to come off soon enough. It will still be slow process that could take many years though.
I don't find Larry Page or Sergey Brin likable but I've certainly never gotten that vibe from them.
One big reason why they're so successful is that they don't try to be everything to everyone, but this has a side effect of ensuring that they can never attain even majority market share in any one product category (in the long term, at least), which appears to be fine by them.
The one exception may be dedicated MP3 players but I'm not sure that that market has been really meaningful for the last 5 years at least.
Plenty of things materially affect my life that are not essential infrastructure.
Not sure I agree, but let's see why you think it's necessary:
> More likely, they could work with oppressive governments to remove certain unpleasant historical events from people's sight.
...um, that's an example of government regulation of Google. You can't use preventing X as a reason for implementing X. That's like saying you should smoke cigarettes to make sure you don't get cancer. >.<
What you seem to be saying is "I trust the EU, and I wish they would regulate Google AND their regulations would trump the regulations of all the other governments I don't trust". Unfortunately, that's not how the world works.
Maybe I'm out in left field here, but I thought that one of the hallmarks of infrastructure was a monopoly due to geographical concerns - it wouldn't make sense to run twelve different parallel power grids all over town. There is no such constraint here. Google, Facebook, etc are all big, but there's no lack of place to run power lines in play to stop a competitor from competing in their space (See DuckDuckGo, for example).
(the statement released by RG)
"We are working with Google right now to resolve this. They’ve been really great, helping us identify changes we need to make, even on Christmas. We’re working on it as fast as we can, and expect to be back on Google very soon."
http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/
Let's see what happens but it seems like a stretch that Google would feel compelled to 'negotiate' with RapGenius.
Reference 2: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/09/03/why-the-music-industry...
"Live" person at Google might as well be delivering the old same beaten up "write unique content" and "remove bad links" message to them, albeit in personalized format.
I don't think rapgenius is big enough to buy Google a drink for a free personalized SEO tips.