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Rap Genius Returns To Google Search Rankings
theodp writes "After being punished by Google for manipulative SEO tactics, a contrite Rap Genius says it's back in Google's good graces. 'It takes a few days for things to return to normal, but we're officially back!' reads a post by the Rap Genius founders. 'First of all, we owe a big thanks to Google for being fair and transparent and allowing us back onto their results pages. We overstepped, and we deserved to get smacked.' Rap Genius credits some clever trackback scraping programming for its quick redemption, but a skeptic might suggest it probably didn't hurt that Rap Genius' biggest investor, Andreessen Horowitz, is tight with Google."
Q: Rap Genius?
A: Oxymoron
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
who?
Seriously, who worth their space in this universe gives even the tiniest of shits about anyone or anything called "Rap Genius"?
If the goal was to appear as utterly and embarrassingly trivial and shitty as possible, well.... Congratulations are in order.
Mother fuckers.
They (SEOs) are the reason why you have to wade through pages of shit to get to the information you want.
They are the reason why I and people like me will ask a question and get pissed off when someone says "Let me google that for you" or "Why don't you just google it?!" I DID and all I got were links to shit! When I google to find out something I DO NOT WANT TO BUY CRAP! I WILL click on "Shopping" if I want to buy. GOD! What's so fucking hard about that?
They and the "Reputation Management" fuckers are the reason why liars, crooks and unethical business people and professionals continue to rip-people off and in some cases, cause irreverible physical harm.
Delete this stupid article and smack whoever posted it. what a load of useless shit.
"Smart move."
But it turns out that very few other websites want to give you a "free link".
Want to know why? BECAUSE YOUR SITE FUCKING SUCKS!
I'm up for joining your startup to build a better search engine. You obviously have some clever ideas on how to do it.
Rap sucks ass!
Unfortunately, it's the boundaries of how un-newsworthy content can be and still be called "news".
Someone I've never heard of does dodgy SEO, gets banned by Google, then gets the ban lifted (+- unproven allegation of favouritism) and I'm supposed to give a shit?
Happens every day, almost entirely to other people I've never heard of either.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
I've been in the computing industry since the 1970s. I've seen trends come, and I've seen trends go. I've seen people come, I've seen people go. I've seen companies come, I've seen companies go. I've seen technologies come, I've seen technologies go.
But over these several decades of experience, the worst, and I mean the very worst, people I've ever had to deal with are the hipsters that have weaseled their way in since 2008 or so. They've advocated for some of the worst technologies we've ever seen (JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, NoSQL), while engaging in some of the ugliest business and social practices (collecting and selling huge amounts of private information, "lifestyle businesses", scummy SEO tactics).
They aren't contained just to industry, either. They've got their rotten tentacles into open source projects, too. They've almost single-handedly destroyed GNOME 3 at this point. Firefox is not far behind. And their obsession with git (and GitHub) has basically destroyed the practice of proper releases, especially of libraries.
We need to shun these people. Anyone hiring in industry should avoid them at all costs. Anyone working on open source projects should refuse to let them contribute. While open source projects are often in desperate need of help, this is surely not the kind of help that is needed. We don't need hipsters involved with software development of any type.
Slashdot has never been known as a paragon of high-quality journalism. But things are surely getting worse as of late.
I've been here since early 1998, and things have gotten remarkably stupid around here lately. The submissions are utter crap. This is a perfect example. It used to be that there'd be maybe one or two absolutely idiotic ones per day. But these days it's basically the opposite. There are a couple of good submissions among a bunch of awful ones.
The moderation is getting pretty bad, too. I often see excellent comments moderated down, apparently only because they contain an "unconventional" or "painfully true" viewpoint. At least in the past we'd see multiple comments, often with very different viewpoints, modded up. It would only be blatant spam, penisbirds and goatses that would be modded down.
And don't even get me started on the beta site. Everything about it is so horrible. Everybody who has been forced to use it clearly hates it. It's a failed software project that should have been terminated a long time ago.
I liked coming to Slashdot because it wasn't Digg, it wasn't reddit, and it wasn't Hacker News. It was better than all of them, from the submissions to the discussion to the moderation. At least the ability to post anonymously is still around. That's the last thing keeping Slashdot as a viable news site, I feel.
I really hope that the situation changes at some point. I hope that the submission quality goes up. I hope that the moderation improves. I hope that Slashdot takes its own direction, rather than following Digg, reddit and HN down the path of tyranny and shit.
My understanding is that if someone typed in Rap Genius the site would not come up. This to me is simply unprofessional behavior on the side of Google. Yes, demote the ranking if someone uses another search term. Yes, put a mark next to it saying the site is on probabation. But to not list the site when that is what a user wants. Sheer child like temper tantrum.
I will tell you that when I do a popular search, I still get link farms, ad farms, and sites with only marginal content. On a recent search, the fourthwas one of those sites that just generate random words so they can get hits. How is this acceptable behavior?
Honestly I don't care about SEO manipulation. That is a google problem, and a problem they have created, and a problem they have not been able to fix, as far as I can tell. Punishing the free market for taking advantage of the fact that Google's algorithm is broken is not going to do anything.
A bit of history. Google replaced Alta Vista because Alta Vista used keywords. It depended on all websites to be honest and only put relevant keywords. Surprisingly, many websites were not honest and would track the most searched keywords and put those in so visitors would be directed to these sites, which often were nothing but link and ad farms, though no where as bad as what we see now. The problem was not solved by retaliation, but with a new search engine.
Google throws these temper tantrums because it can do nothing else. It can't innovate, it wastes so much money that it can't do research, and spends so much money killing other innovation that we can't get a new engine. So it sues, it creates these arbitrary rules, and it won't work.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
they wouldn't have banned him in the first place. they would have contacted em and then made them resolve it.
He doesn't have to build an alternative in order to criticize Google and their search engine design and implementation. As a user of Google's offerings, he's more than qualified to criticize them however he sees fit.
And thanks for helping the losers out /.
How much did they pay the editors for this piece of garbage?
dumb jew motherfuckers like *witz are the reason hiphop has gone to shit
of course their jew friends get special treatment by google. a normal little guy would be banned forever, and their name would never be mentioned.
Thanks jewdot.
I didn't RTFA I didn't even finish reading the whole summary. This is stupid advertizing. This makes me feel like looking for other news outlets...
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
From the article on Business Insider:
1. It's pretty crazy that Google can just do this to a company. How is this legal? Google is so essential to so many companies, and yet it's virtually unregulated and can do what it wants to decimate a company. Rap Genius had better have been committing some seriously shady SEO tricks to get this sort of a punishment. Otherwise, this seems unfair.
That's a high-quality writer there.
Jesus, you're a moron. An Ayn Rand Paul Coo Coo Nut, I assume.
For one thing, static typing is like having unit tests that your compiler automatically writes for you. It automatically catches certain classes of program defects before your program even starts running. For another, sometimes you do have to count bits when you're trying to squeeze 10,000 concurrent HTTP or HTTPS connections on one server.
So the lesson is to spam, and if you get caught, disavow the links that trigger Google penalty?
Sounds like a no-lose proposition.
I thought all geniuses work forr apple at their bar ;^)
I'm grumbling myself, having been around (and yes, trolling as AC sometimes) since pre-2000 myself. I changed users because I rather use a handle than my initials these days.
Beta.slashdot.org is awful.
Slashdot is bad, but what is out there is worse:
Reddit just has people cooing about BitCoin and any sentiment to the contrary will get feedback similar to posting to /b/ saying how you can't stand anonymous users and this should be illegal.
Digg is just plain fail. Too many people with lots of accounts that will bury you with their bots the second you say something out of the PC line.
So far, the sanest discussion I see outside of private mailing lists or heavily moderated forums tends to be /., but the articles seem mainly to be about how cool BitCoin is, How cool the triad of treason Manning/Assange/Snowden is, another "revelation" about the NSA, or some article cooing about the latest Apple toy and how Apple can never fail or make a dud product.
"Rap Genius" is a misleading and silly name for what, transcription software like DragonWriter? Actually, it might not even be that good (all I read about lately are Internet piecework/ sweatshops that are supposedly "social" and "democratizing"...except they aren't).
I know that Mark Andreessen funded it, but he isn't right about everything.
tempus fugit
What is music but organized noise? Your definition of music is self-manufactured to exclude a genre of music that you don't like.
Any system of organized sounds that has some kind of rhythm is music. This includes rap, pop, tribal drum beats, and whatever daft punk is classified as. It may not be your taste, but it's music. That you're arguing it's not seems pedantic.
that is simply insane, people like you make the university IT-environment a living hell.
Mail lists deserve to die.
Hey folks,
I work with a company called Remove'em that does penalty removal for thousands of businesses. This is newsworthy because...
1. The size of the penalty (Rap Genius received millions of visitors from Google regularly)
2. The speed of the recovery (Despite far better technology than that described by Rap Genius (a trackback scraper, lol)), the average penalty removal campaign is closer to 3 months. It normally takes weeks for Google to simply respond to a Reconsideration Request, not counting the time it takes to actually get bad links removed at sufficient enough level to make Google pleased.
3. The direct ties to Google insiders.
I am very glad this is making it to Slashdot. All too often the only news we hear about from big tech companies is related to their innovation, and not their business practices. What is perhaps more important is Google's quick-to-penalize policy these days have opened the door for "negative seo" which we see time and time again now. If/when your site falls victim to these tactics, do not expect Google to respond in any manner close to that of Rap Genius.
I find some forums often have a high pagerank. So you can make a punch of posts, be inactive for a few weeks so your posts are off the front page and then change your signature so that it links to your site. Suddenly a top rated site is now linking to you many times.
Obviously you need to do more than that if you want to be result #1 but it's a good way to at least get your site within the first couple of pages.
At this point in time, Bing is a better search engine than Google. Google just keeps digging a deeper and deeper hole for themselves with all of these worthless and often detrimental changes.
Also, remember what you said here before you ever criticize a piece of software, movie, book, music or any product. If you personally haven't made better, then you can't complain.