Image credit: Photo by Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch.
December 2013 was a bit of a hectic month for the world renowned lyrics site Rap Genius, users from all over the world use the website to understand lyrics. Hence it is a user content generated site in the sense that those who feel they understand what the artist meant or the idea the artist tried to convey in the song lyrics help others to know this by inputting the ‘meanings of the lyrics’ into each bar.
So with albums and Mix Tapes being dropped during this period Rap Genius would have expected a rather busy Christmas with the usual flow of traffic.
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Unfortunately However that was not the case as the website got penalised for some black hat SEO tactics.
The summary of which was essentially excessive unnatural link building (but now they are back.)
Now from an SEO perspective when it comes to Google the best way to look at it is that Google is a librarian and your website is a book, the better the book is written (i.e the content) the easier the job is for the librarian when someone comes along look for a book on the topic you have written.
What’s more interesting is that from an Online Reputation Management point of view the ability to wipe the slate clean is the most revered and coveted powers but its not available to mere mortals and for good reason.
As Spidey would say ”with great power comes great responsibility” and if people knew they could easily just wipe the slate clean at the shake of a wand I doubt that would be a good environment to operate in.
Measure people by how they behave knowing they won’t get caught or they can EASILY delete after getting caught.
For most of Xmas up (until the early days of 2014 update) it was almost like Rap Genius never existed and as such they saw their traffic fall tremendously according to Quantcast
An interesting point here been that even if people do know your web address they are likely to Google it rather than just type it in straight into the url address bar which you would think is counter intuitive but in reality we all do it like its second nature almost like our brain sees that as the more normal approach.
Therefore in a situation where your most important Online Asset has been wiped out it essentially destroys a huge chunk of your traffic source so the moral of the story is to maintain a good Online Reputation Management strategy and maintain good SEO practices.