Rap Genius is Back on Google
Honestly, this is just saddening.  Google needs to have a consistent policy towards these blackhat SEO offenders and enforce it for everyone.  RapGenius bought backlinks to artificially inflate their pagerank.  They knew they were cheating but they did it anyway.  They got caught.  And they were hit with a manual action on Google.  Sounds good so far.  But that's where it stops.  RapGenius, using the connections they have from their multi-million dollars in VC funding, got back on Google and was able to avoid paying the price for their cheating.<p>Compare this to regular websites.  Lots of smaller sites will end up paying a "whitehat SEO" firm to work on a "link strategy".  These firms will claim up down and sideways that what they do is legal, ethical and follows Google's rules.  But, what they actually do is either (1) create networks of fake sites to provide backlinks on certain terms to artificially boost the site, (2) place spam comments using bots on legitimate sites to do the same [not that this will thankfully no longer work well due to the latest Google algorithm update], or (3) pay legit sites to place backlinks to artificially transfer pagerank the same way that RapGenius did.  Now, these other sites, when they get caught, they get a manual action or a smackdown.  The difference?  They have to actually pay the penalty.  Arguing that they didn't know usually doesn't work.  The penalty is LONG.  They can't call on their VC firm to make calls at Google to give them a get out of jail free card.<p>I'd like to call on Google to create a public policy on how they handle these manual actions with some clearly defined penalties (example: 3 month manual action of 6 PR drop, etc) and to consistently enforce them across the board.  That way a mom and pop site that pays a 'whitehat SEO firm' and gets caught doesn't have a worse time than a site like RapGenius that purposely engages in blackhat SEO who can use their VC connections to get out of having to pay a penalty in under 2 weeks.  It's also sad that Google gave this get out of jail free card to a site whose entire business model is based around other people's copyrighted works which RapGenius doesn't have a license for, doesn't pay for, and publishes illegally.