Rap Genius Traffic Has Dropped By Over 80%

An interesting side effect of this is the phenomenon of less sophisticated users who use Google as their address bar. If you run a decently well-known website you see this in your analytics reports (at least back when you could see Google search keywords)--repeat visitors coming to your site from Google after searching for your site by name. This is why &quot;facebook&quot; is the top Google search.<p>Since you can&#x27;t find RapGenius by searching for it there is a decent sized audience of people who are under the assumption that RapGenius <i>does not exist anymore</i>. It&#x27;s bizarre to the HN crowd, but very real. Check out their twitter feed:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/RapGenius" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;RapGenius</a>

If RG thinks they&#x27;re so great (and all the bandwagoners on HN), then they should prove it by playing fairly.<p>My suspicion is that the vast majority of people who search for lyrics don&#x27;t care about song meanings or annotations. Azlyrics does just fine, which is why they&#x27;ve always been at the top. If people wanted song meanings they would search for song meanings.<p>My theory is that RG wasn&#x27;t able to grow as fast as they hoped and have to resort to these methods. How else can RG justify a $15 million investment? Their biggest competitor, songmeanings.com, is bootstrapped with only a couple employees, which shows the true market size of the song meanings &#x2F; annotations market.<p>Remember that most consumers want things that are insanely simple and give them immediate satisfaction. I&#x27;m not surprised that most people on HN think otherwise as they tend to be deeper thinkers than the average consumer.

I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s right or wrong what Google did, but it was certainly a shit business decision. It&#x27;s Google&#x27;s job to be a proper search tool for anyone to get the best possible results when searching something as simple as &quot;rapgenius&quot;. If I search &quot;rapgenius&quot; and don&#x27;t get the hugely popular website <a href="http://rapgenius.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rapgenius.com</a> as the first result, then that&#x27;s bad service on Google&#x27;s end.

Microsoft should jump on this. Run ads promoting Rap Genius as the best lyrics site on the web, and noting that you can find it easily with Bing, but not with Google. Kind of like those Visa ads that highlighted some cool place and then said don&#x27;t bother of you use American Express, because the cool place doesn&#x27;t take AmEx, it takes Visa.

I find Google&#x27;s actions to be bizarre.<p>Getting people to link to you is what SEO is all about. Basically every site concerned with SEO does it in one form or another -- I thought this was what most every blog affiliate program was about!<p>So Google decides to &quot;punish&quot; RapGenius just because its program got a little bit of public notice, while 99.9% of other sites which do the same, continue doing the same thing, unpunished?<p>It just comes across as capricious and petty. For a site as large as Google, there should be some kind of <i>due process</i> involved with clear published guidelines, or (preferably) they should just work on improving their algorithm.<p>How is what Rap Genius is doing any different than Amazon or iTunes paying you for affiliate links, or you paying a blog to advertise you, or buying a friend a beer to include a link to you? Where exactly does the line get drawn?

This has moved from an interesting case study in SEO to unadulterated schadenfreude.

What I find shocking is a single company (Google) has the power to cause such a dramatic decrease of a website it deemed &quot;unworthy&quot;.<p>Sure, it can justify its actions by saying they broke the rules, but pressing the a &quot;death button&quot; for a website is not a solution.<p>I feel as though Google needs to re-examine their core principles and determine how to better handle an issue like this. Otherwise, I suspect Google might have anti-trust and anti-competitive issues and the government might set the rules for them, and we all know how bad that would be.

Which is really a shame, because RapGenius is a better lyrics site than all the rest by leaps and bounds. Google is acting like a cartel here and it&#x27;s absolutely ridiculous. I hope they can beat this thing.

It started out as rap genius and now its extending its tentacles to all types of music and even non-music related subjects Eventually, it would become just another annoying agitator website that clutters the search results with less than helpful results, so this was a good move on google&#x27;s part.

There really needs to be some checks and balances here. Perhaps an opensource search engine? I think an entity like Google having so much control over which businesses die or survive is a little ridiculous.

ironically google trends shows a massive increase in interest <a href="http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=rapgenius.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore#q=rapgenius.com</a>

Hmm...<p>&quot;This site reaches over 24 million monthly people, of which 12 million (48%) are in the U.S.The typical visitor watches Nickelodeon, visits pbskids.org, and listens to National Public Radio.&quot;

Does this not prove the incentive to win at SEO at all costs?<p>Has google disclosed other sites penalized for the same behavior?

So everyone talks about RG being superior due to its annotation. (true) But doesn&#x27;t this identify that 80% of it&#x27;s traffic comes from &quot;m-low dogg gangsta money freaks and junk lyrics&quot; searches? So at maximum, 20% of users use annotation features (surely some still use it for purely lyrics simply due to it being it easy to remember)

I wonder if this penalty would have been this severe if their &quot;apology&quot; was an actual apology. If I was in Google&#x27;s position and had waited to see the RG response, I would have been less forgiving after the tone of that letter. But that is just my opinion...

Impressive what one company can do to you if they decide you&#x27;re not playing by their rules. (Not defending RG, I just think this is a good example of how much power Google has..)

Has Google specified when the penalty will end?

Why?

why is rap genius the best for lyrics? if i want lyrics, i want a simple print out of the lyrics

&quot;Don&#x27;t be evil.&quot; Well, at least until you become a monopolist. Then go right ahead.

it&#x27;s ridiculous! Google cannot do this!