They are back because they did a lot of work finding all these bad links and using Google’s disavowal tool to kill them, not because of their VC funding or whatever other influence you think they have on Google.
Removing 200 links out of nearly 200,000 links in a holiday week is not a lot of work. In fact, Google has told others waiting to be reconsidered that the wait time is multiple weeks.
https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/statuses/418734227228606464
Further, some sites which submitted reconsideration requests before RapGenius was penalized have not received a response. And in many such cases those other sites:
had far fewer links, removed a far greater quantity of links, disavowed a far greater quantity of links & were involved in something that was nowhere near as overt/intentional on the behalf of the webmaster (I've seen cases where the notices came after a payday loan hacker mixed in someone else's sites with their own links to create cover for their work)
Not to argue with Aaron Wall on an SEO topic, but you read the same article I did. There were 200,000 total links to Rap Genius and most of them were legit. Only a small subset analyzed ended up being suspicious.
They got 200 webmasters to remove their links, a few didn't, and the rest ended up being "site scrapers" who steal other people's sites. They just added those to disavow. Seems like they acted very quickly to rectify every suspicious link they could find.
But yes, they got special treatment in having the manual penalty removed after only a few days. But it's a legitimately popular site. You'd expect Google to do that since its harming Google's own users during the penalty.
A very well known and funded business gets preferential treatment. BOO-HOO. Do you think Bill Gates waits on a line at the bank? At the mayor's office? Anywhere at all? In real life if you are powerful, you get respect.
There is no such thing as fairness. It's a paradigm of the feeble minded. Most likely a defense mechanism - "look guys, he cheated on the exam, let's tell the teacher!".
So does this mean when Google talks about these same topics & uses the same sort of black-and-white framing (while encouraging "feeble minded" spam reporting and so on) we should consider them to be intentionally lying?
If no, please explain.
If yes, an important follow up on that front: how dystopian is it that the company in charge of organizing information requires spreading misinformation to succeed?
They are back because they did a lot of work finding all these bad links and using Google’s disavowal tool to kill them, not because of their VC funding or whatever other influence you think they have on Google.