Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes
Google has penalized Rap Genius for link schemes this morning. If you go to Google and search for [rap genius], rapgenius.com will not be found on the first page. Instead you will find links to their Twitter account, Facebook page, Wikipedia profile an…
Did Google’s Happy Holidays Logo Get More Christmasy With ‘Tis The Season
With all the complaints this year and last year with Google’s Happy Holidays logos, Google may have decided to change it up a bit…
Christmas Day Logos From The Search Industry (2013 Edition)
Yesterday I promised to catalog the Christmas Day logos from the search industry, when I documented the Christmas eve logos. Some of the logos did not change from day to day…
Best of 2013: No 12 – 6 Great Project Management Tools for Improving Agency Efficiency #bestof2013stod
Paul Rogers takes a look at what requirements for Project Management Tools in SEO are and which one are living up to that standard.
Post from Paul Rogers on State of Digital
Best of 2013: No 12 – 6 Great Project Management Tools for Improving Agency Efficiency #bestof2013stod
Happy Holidays Google Logo Day Two: Same Theme, But With An Urban-Inspired Illustration
Today’s Christmas Day Google logo looks similar to yesterday’s logo, with the same layout and border; but, includes artwork inspired by a more urban scene compared to yesterday’s horse-drawn sled. The logo includes an illustrated image of a city block complete with lighted…
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SearchCap: The Day In Search, December 24, 2013
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Don’t miss out on learning from the pros. Attend an SMX West workshop! Sharpen your marketing skill set by attending one of six in-depth workshops offered…
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Should Venture Backed Startups Engage in Spammy SEO?
Here’s a recent video of the founders of RapGenius talking at TechCrunch disrupt.
Oops, wrong video. Here’s the right one. Same difference.
Recently a thread on Hacker News highlighted a blog post which pointed how RapGenius was engaging in reciprocal promotional arrangements where they would promote blogs on their Facebook or Twitter accounts if those bloggers would post a laundry list of keyword rich deeplinks at RapGenius.
Matt Cutts quickly chimed in on Hacker News “we’re investigating this now.”
A friend of mine and I were chatting yesterday about what would happen. My prediction was that absolutely nothing would happen to RapGenius, they would issue a faux apology, they would put no effort into cleaning up the existing links, and the apology alone would be sufficient evidence of good faith that the issue dies there.
Today RapGenius published a mea culpa where ultimately they defended their own spam by complaining about how spammy other lyrics websites are. The self-serving jackasses went so far as including this in their post: “With limited tools (Open Site Explorer), we found some suspicious backlinks to some of our competitors”
It’s one thing to in private complain about dealing in a frustrating area, but it’s another thing to publicly throw your direct competitors under the bus with a table of link types and paint them as being black hat spammers.
Google can’t afford to penalize Rap Genius, because if they do Google Ventures will lose deal flow on the start ups Google co-invests in.
In the past some of Google’s other investments were into companies that were pretty overtly spamming. RetailMeNot held multiple giveaways where if you embedded a spammy sidebar set of deeplinks to their various pages they gave you a free t-shirt:

Google’s behavior on such arrangements has usually been to hit the smaller players while looking the other way on the bigger site on the other end of the transaction.
That free t-shirt for links post was from 2010 – the same year that Google invested in RetailMeNot. They did those promotions multiple times & long enough that they ran out of t-shirts!. Now that RTM is a publicly traded billion Dollar company which Google already endorsed by investing in, there’s a zero percent chance of them getting penalized.
To recap, if you are VC-backed you can: spam away, wait until you are outed, when outed reply with a combined “we didn’t know” and a “our competitors are spammers” deflective response.
For the sake of clarity, let’s compare that string of events (spam, warning but no penalty, no effort needed to clean up, insincere mea culpa) to how a websites are treated when not VC backed. For smaller sites it is “shoot on sight” first and then ask questions later, perhaps coupled with a friendly recommendation to start over.
Here’s a post from today highlighting a quote from Google’s John Mueller:
My personal & direct recommendation here would be to treat this site as a learning experience from a technical point of view, and then to find something that you’re absolutely passionate & knowledgeable about and create a website for that instead.
Growth hack inbound content marketing, but just don’t call it SEO.
Growth hacking = using 2005-era spam tactics. http://t.co/5ISCPmMEkp cc @samfbiddle @nitashatiku
— Max Woolf (@minimaxir) December 23, 2013
What’s worse, is with the new fearmongering disavow promotional stuff, not only are some folks being penalized for the efforts of others, but some are being penalized for links that were in place BEFORE Google even launched as a company.
Google wants me to disavow links that existed back when backrub was foreplay and not an algo. Hubris much?
— Cygnus SEO (@CygnusSEO) December 21, 2013
Given that money allegedly shouldn’t impact rankings, its sad to note that as everything that is effective gets labeled as spam, capital and connections are the key SEO innovations in the current Google ecosystem.
Don’t miss out on learning from the pros. Attend an SMX West workshop!
Sharpen your marketing skill set by attending one of six in-depth workshops offered on March 10. Choose from SEO, Advanced AdWords Training, International Search Marketing, Social Content Distribution for SEO, In-House SEO, or Content Marketing. All Ac…
The 2013 Santa Tracker List: All The Ways To Track Santa From NORAD & Google
It’s Christmas Eve, time for all good boys and girls to be expecting Santa Claus to be bringing them gifts. But where is jolly old St. Nick on his journey? Once again, there are two major services tracking him: NORAD and Google. Below, our annual review of the tracking sites and methods of…
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PPC Excel Tips For Every Level: Part 1, Huge Time Savers For Beginners (And Beyond)
Excel is that must-have tool for managing, analyzing and reporting on paid search campaigns that is impossible to know too well. Many of us are self-taught — picking up tips and tricks here and there — which makes it even harder to know what shortcuts and secret powers we’re…
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Christmas Eve Logos From The Search Industry (2013 Edition)
Happy Christmas, or Happy Holidays as Google would say, to all our readers. As we do every year, I wanted to share the various logos from around the search community for Christmas Eve.
Tomorrow I will post the Christmas Day logos but here are Christm…
How Link Building Changed in 2013
Google rolled out several algorithmic updates and other significant changes, and there was much discussion around penalties and disavowing links. Through it all, links remain incredibly important, and link building won’t be going away any time soon.
The 7 Types Of People Who Want To Help You Build Links
With so much of link building focused on creating actual relationships these days, the idea that you can build high-quality links without people seems preposterous. Yes, I know there are still things like directories and post submissions but, come on… a real person has to approve those, right?…
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Search Engine Land’s Most-Shared Stories on Facebook for 2013: How To Survive Google, Plus A Joke Here & There
Search marketing friends — welcome, welcome! It’s time for another installment of our Search Engine Land Year In Review series. We’ve toured through the top news stories and those that were most tweeted – now it’s time to scope out the articles, tutorials, resources,…
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A Paid Search Christmas Carol: Learn From The Ghosts Of SEM Past, Present & Future
‘Twas the night before Christmas in the search marketing department and SEM Director Scrooge was heading out hours before his staff. “Director Scrooge,” said one of the young SEM analysts, Tiny Tim. “It’s Christmas Eve. The gang and I wanted to know if we could get a paid search management tool for…
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A 7-Step Guide To Maximizing The Reach Of Your B2B Content
Forrester Research recently released a report called Put Distribution at the Heart of Your Content Marketing, which addresses an issue of increasing importance within the content marketing world. Many marketers are very focused on writing top quality content. The process of brainstorming, creating,…
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Google Is Looking Into Rap Genius Linking Scheme Masked As Affiliate Program
Yesterday, John Marbach exposed the popular music side, Rap Genuis, for starting an “affiliate” program in order to get unnatural links pointing to their web site. After it was exposed, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, said, “we’re aware and looking into…
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Google Sharing More About What Their Algorithms Think
About a month ago, we reported that Googlers indeed know if a site is impacted by an algorithm or not – not just if a site is impacted by a manual action…
Google’s Happy Holidays Doodle More Christian Friendly This Year?
As you know, Google’s Happy Holidays logos are up today, but for Christmas Eve here and Christmas Day (in Australia now).
Last year, there was huge firestorm about the logo being hurtful to Christians. Why…
When You Have Bad Links Impacting Your Google Rankings, Which Do You Remove?
I see this all the time, a forum thread, where a webmaster knows his rankings are suffering in Google because he was hit by Penguin because he has a lot of really bad…