Did Matt Cutts Endorse Rap Genius Link Spam?

On TWIG Matt Cutts spoke about the importance of defunding spammers & breaking their spirits.

If you want to stop spam, the most straight forward way to do it is to deny people money because they care about the money and that should be their end goal. But if you really want to stop spam, it is a little bit mean, but what you want to do, is break their spirits. You want to make them frustrated and angry. There are parts of Google's algorithms specifically designed to frustrate spammers and mystify them and make them frustrated. And some of the stuff we do gives people a hint their site is going to drop and then a week or two later their site actually does drop so they get a little bit more frustrated. And so hopefully, and we've seen this happen, people step away from the dark side and say "you know, that was so much pain and anguish and frustration, let's just stay on the high road from now on" some of the stuff I like best is when people say "you know this SEO stuff is too unpredictable, I'm just going to write some apps. I'm going to go off and do something productive for society." And that's great because all that energy is channeled at something good.

What was less covered was that in the same video Matt Cutts made it sound like anything beyond information architecture, duplicate content cleanup & clean URLs was quickly approaching scamming - especially anything to do with links. So over time more and more behaviors get reclassified as black hat spam as Google gains greater control over the ecosystem.

there's the kind of SEO that is better architecture, cleaner URLs, not duplicate content ... that's just like making sure your resume doesn't have any typos on it. that's just clever stuff. and then there's the type of SEO that is sort of cheating. trying to get a lot of bad backlinks or scamming, and that's more like lying on your resume. when you get caught sometime's there's repercussions. and it definitely helps to personalize because now anywhere you search for plumbers there's local results and they are not the same across the world. we've done a diligent job of trying to crack down on black hat spam. so we had an algorithm named Penguin that launched that kind of had a really big impact. we had a more recent launch just a few months ago. and if you go and patrole the black hat SEO forums where the guys talk about the techniques that work, now its more people trying to sell other people scams rather than just trading tips. a lot of the life has gone out of those forums. and even the smaller networks that they're trying to promote "oh buy my anglo rank or whatever" we're in the process of tackling a lot of those link networks as well. the good part is if you want to create a real site you don't have to worry as much about these bad guys jumping ahead of you. the playing ground is a lot more level now. panda was for low quality. penguin was for spam - actual cheating.

The Matt Cutts BDSM School of SEO

As part of the ongoing campaign to "break their spirits" we get increasing obfuscation, greater time delays between certain algorithmic updates, algorithmic features built explicitly with the goal of frustrating people, greater brand bias, and more outrageous selective enforcement of the guidelines.

Those who were hit by either Panda or Penguin in some cases took a year or more to recover. Far more common is no recovery — ever. How long do you invest in & how much do you invest in a dying project when the recovery timeline is unknown?

You Don't Get to Fascism Without 2-Tier Enforcement

While success in and of itself may make one a "spammer" to the biased eyes of a search engineer (especially if you are not VC funded nor part of a large corporation), many who are considered "spammers" self-regulate in a way that make them far more conservative than the alleged "clean" sites do.

Pretend you are Ask.com and watch yourself get slaughtered without warning.

Build a big brand & you will have advanced notification & free customer support inside the GooglePlex:

In my experience with large brand penalties, (ie, LARGE global brands) Google have reached out in advance of the ban every single time. - Martin Macdonald

Launching a Viral Linkspam Sitemap Campaign

When RapGenius was penalized, the reason they were penalized is they were broadly and openly and publicly soliciting to promote bloggers who would dump a list of keyword rich deeplinks into their blog posts. They were basically turning boatloads of blogs into mini-sitemaps for popular new music albums.

Remember reading dozens (hundreds?) of blog posts last year about how guest posts are spam & Google should kill them? Well these posts from RapGenius were like a guest post on steroids. The post "buyer" didn't have to pay a single cent for the content, didn't care at all about relevancy, AND a sitemap full of keyword rich deep linking spam was included in EACH AND EVERY post.

Most "spammers" would never attempt such a campaign because they would view it as being far too spammy. They would have a zero percent chance of recovery as Google effectively deletes their site from the web.

And while RG is quick to distance itself from scraper sites, for almost the entirety of their history virtually none of the lyrics posted on their site were even licensed.

In the past I've mentioned Google is known to time the news cycle. It comes without surprise that on a Saturday barely a week after being penalized Google restored RapGenius's rankings.

How to Gain Over 400% More Links, While Allegedly Losing

While the following graph may look scary in isolation, if you know the penalty is only a week or two then there's virtually no downside.

Since being penalized, RapGenius has gained links from over 1,000* domains

  • December 25th: 129
  • December 26th: 85
  • December 27th: 87
  • December 28th: 54
  • December 29th: 61
  • December 30th: 105
  • December 31st: 182
  • January 1st: 142
  • January 2nd: 112
  • January 3rd: 122

The above add up to 1,079 & RapGenius only has built a total of 11,930 unique linking domains in their lifetime. They grew about 10% in 10 days!

On every single day the number of new referring domains VASTLY exceeded the number of referring domains that disappeared. And many of these new referring domains are the mainstream media and tech press sites, which are both vastly over-represented in importance/authority on the link graph. They not only gained far more links than they lost, but they also gained far higher quality links that will be nearly impossible for their (less spammy) competitors to duplicate.

They not only got links, but the press coverage acted as a branded advertising campaign for RapGenius.

Here's some quotes from RapGenius on their quick recovery:

  • "we owe a big thanks to Google for being fair and transparent and allowing us back onto their results pages" <-- Not the least bit true. RapGenius was not treated fairly, but rather they were given a free ride compared to the death hundreds of thousands of small businesses have been been handed over the past couple years.
  • "On guest posts, we appended lists of song links (often tracklists of popular new albums) that were sometimes completely unrelated to the music that was the subject of the post." <-- and yet others are afraid of writing relevant on topic posts due to Google's ramped fearmongering campaigns
  • "we compiled a list of 100 “potentially problematic domains”" <-- so their initial list of domains to inspect was less than 10% the number of links they gained while being penalized
  • "Generally Google doesn’t hold you responsible for unnatural inbound links outside of your control" <-- another lie
  • "of the 286 potentially problematic URLs that we manually identified, 217 (more than 75 percent!) have already had all unnatural links purged." <-- even the "all in" removal of pages was less than 25% of the number of unique linking domains generated during the penalty period

And Google allowed the above bullshit during a period when they were sending out messages telling other people WHO DID THINGS FAR LESS EGREGIOUS that they are required to remove more links & Google won't even look at their review requests for at least a couple weeks - A TIME PERIOD GREATER THAN THE ENTIRE TIME RAPGENIUS WAS PENALIZED FOR.

In Conclusion...

If you tell people what works and why you are a spammer with no morals. But if you are VC funded, Matt Cutts has made it clear that you should spam the crap out of Google. Just make sure you hire a PR firm to trump up press coverage of the "unexpected" event & have a faux apology saved in advance. So long as you lie to others and spread Google's propaganda you are behaving in an ethical white hat manner.

Notes

* These stats are from Ahrefs. A few of these links may have been in place before the penality and only recently crawled. However it is also worth mentioning that all third party databases of links are limited in size & refresh rate by optimizing their capital spend, so there are likely hundreds more links which have not yet been crawled by Ahrefs. One should also note that the story is still ongoing and they keep generating more links every day. By the time the story is done spreading they are likely to see roughly a 30% growth in unique linking domains in about 6 weeks.

Published: January 4, 2014 by Aaron Wall in google

Comments

ramirez.seo
January 4, 2014 - 11:48pm

I'm outraged by this double-standard as well. I work with small to mid-sized businesses that are DEVESTATED by these types of manual actions. I have two clients that have had reconsideration requests sitting in Google's inbox since mid-December, still with no response. Google now telling websie owners that they won't consider concurrent reconsideration requests without "a few weeks" passing between requests, but removing Rap Genius entire penalty in a little over 1 week is shocking and sad. Maybe not shocking, but definitely sad.

gour
January 5, 2014 - 4:45am

> Maybe not shocking, but definitely sad.

Let's stop behaving as there are no alternatives...let's use open-source analyitcs (e.g. Piwik) etc. What can we expect if we're feeding the 'wrong' dog?

Sunday
January 6, 2014 - 12:07pm

In whatever way we look at spams, one thing is clear, the search engines eventually determines the levels of content that determines spam.
Although this post has tried to expound on what constitute valid spams, its still clear that every decision of who to be "punished" for spamming is exclusively Google's.
The Rap Genius case is an example of Google's double standard.

I have shared this comment in kingged.com where this post was found and syndicated for Internet marketers.

Sunday - kingged.com contributor
kingged.com/did-matt-cutts-endorse-rap-genius-link-spam/

orange-giraffe
January 8, 2014 - 4:47pm

Charging different groups of people different prices, or in this case, taking money away from, groups of people based on their income (big money VC vs small business) or brand status, is a type of inverse price discrimination; and might I remind you, several types of price discrimination are illegal in this country.

Google should have no problem letting rap genius rank only for their brand name, and not keywords, should they decide. They do it all the time to small business penalties.

Google preaches how the world should be fair, blah blah, then does nothing to practice that when it comes to them making more money.

affhelper
January 13, 2014 - 6:18am

It's ridiculous how Google discriminates against smaller webmasters. I mean, compare it to my penalty...Not only I had to go through over 70% of my link profile, it took almost a year for them to revoke the penalty. Also, when they finally did my rankings never came back to where it used to be. I don't even monitor my link profile anymore because there is no point.

affhelper
January 13, 2014 - 6:33am

It makes you wonder if the whole thing was a setup. I think they knew they were violating Google's guidelines from the start. They also probably knew it would generate a lot of press and attention from other bigger sites (which means more higher quality backlinks). They also knew Google would let them back in soon after and they will end up strengthening their position in the serps. Nice!

joaquinrios
January 19, 2014 - 5:36pm

It is sad to see that there are double standards when it comes to implementing their measures, but not shocked, since everyone knows how this works, it is a way of marketing to google using rapgenius, in Spain we have a saying that comes from a song that says: so you have both vouchers, not can be cured, if you are one of them that they don't have, to the gallows to paddle!
But of the Black Hat practices is normal that penalizing them, in my opinion are going to a seo rich, only they have good quality links and how popular you are on social networks and blogs, and as you get it, because if the people you share, share your posts, comments, articles, etc... It's that they are of quality and relevance, and google is going to take into account, because ultimately it is what the people demand in their searches.

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