Google recently punished Rap Genius for shady SEO backlink tactics. How bad can a slap on the wrist from Google be?
Check out this graph of Rap Genius’ site traffic, published by Quantcast.
On December 24th Rap Genius had 1,444,516 visits. Traffic abruptly fell when Google knocked down their search ranking on the 25th. On December 26th the site only had 301,322 visits.
Rap Genius’ traffic hasn’t been this low since January 2011. Maybe they should spend less time pointing the finger at others.
Chart source: Quantcast
Imagine what would happen if Google also stopped supporting The Pirate Bay and the other organized crime sites!
It would literally change the world!
Investors would begin to finance mindblowing masterpieces for us all to enjoy. Not only in the music industry, but throughout the creative world — movies, books, software…
I don’t think so. TPB is itself a search engine. It’s more likely people go to TPB’s website directly and search for what they want.
“TPB is itself a search engine. It’s more likely people go to TPB’s website directly and search for what they want.”
You gotta be joking — nobody would know the Pirate Bay without Google’s 24/7 advertising.
Like nobody knew about Napster before Google, oh wait..
Google is not the be all end all of information. I’m sure there are people out there happily pirating garbage from the website because YOU inadvertently informed them of its existence.
Don’t be naive.
Google added a piracy filter a while back.
It literally did none of the things you hoped for.
Oh, really? lol
Come on, do you remember the state of the music industry before Napster? It was pretty dismal. Piracy hasn’t exactly changed much in terms of creative output. The only thing keeping the music industry down is the crufty music industry.
In any case, it’s entirely possible the people slope-browed enough to care about Rap Genius can be easily manipulated by Google. Pirates tend to have above average intelligence and technical skills, and are less likely to be hemmed in by a single search engine.
(Okay, I may be falling into the Poe’s Law trap here. But still, some people actually believe Anonymous.)
Google is the key! but they are practitioners of advertising not merchandising.
So we are screwed unless we can show them how to create and control 50% of 100+ billion music pie!
YouTube as a self service label, efficient copy right registrar and 30B dollar MUSIC STORE is the way to go.
YouTube as retailer and supplier to over 100,000 Radio stations converted to music stores can exceed 50B by 2020.
It is the best prepared entity to become Central Bank of Music, coded product and payment dispensary for all.
Rap Genius has been taking away to much ADVERTISING traffic from YouTube.
Google just removed growing out of control competitor.
“Pirates tend to have above average intelligence and technical skills, and are less likely to be hemmed in by a single search engine.”
Haaaaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂
Omg… 🙂
One million visitors a day going to YouTube instead to RapCrap (another propellant of FREE) means extra 100K of PPC or PLAs a day delivering 3 million dollars a month to Google. It’s just money!
I still don’t get it. Aren’t Rap Genius’ “shady SEO tactics” the same thing as having Justin Bieber tweet a link for a brand that is paying him? Except that in Rap Genius’ case they’re not getting paid, it’s more of a barter, or am I wrong?
Just a question because I am honestly still confused about it.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/
crickets… ok.
they do say that fluoride takes away our ability to resist…