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Banning Rap Genius also made Google look bad. I bet 100,000s of people search Google for "rap genius get lucky" and similar searches every day, and Google was not displaying the results they clearly wanted. In this case, the Google search result page was clearly "worse" for the ban. Google harmed itself also in this ban.

Which does not happen when they ban your herb garden equipment website.




It looks as brand related searches were not that significant until the Google penalty happened.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=rapgenius%2C%20rap%20...

According to Compete.com about 5% of their searches were brand-related queries https://app.compete.com/website/rapgenius.com/

SimilarWeb also shows most their top queries were unbranded http://www.similarweb.com/website/rapgenius.com

Alexa puts the branded-traffic number closer to 2% http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/rapgenius.com

(All these tools have errors, but sites like Amazon.com or eBay are more like 15% to 25%+ on the branded traffic front http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/amazon.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ebay.com ).




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