Hello Marketers, this week we are considering ethics and legal standards in SEO and SEM. What are the ethical and legal standards marketers should be holding themselves to, and what are the consequences of not meeting those standards? There are a few cases that demonstrate those standards and the consequences for violating them, such as the Rap Genius Linking scandal.
For those unfamiliar, Rap Genius (Now rebranded as just Genius) is a popular crowd-sourced annotation platform. It allows users to share the lyrics and deeper meaning behind them. Originally for rap music, it does not feature annotations for other genres of music, poetry, and literature. Started in 2009, it quickly became one of the internet’s most popular destinations for music fans to learn and share the meaning of their favorite songs. If you search for anything related to the keyword “lyrics,” they are likely to be a first page result. Rap Genius was an SEO powerhouse; many wondered what its secret was. Then, in December 2013, we found that secret.
A popular blogger by the name of John Marbach publicly exposed a private communication from Rap Genius soliciting him for a deal they had offered to many others. The blogger would insert unnaturally keyword-heavy backlinks to Rap Genius to pages that were unrelated to the content. In exchange, they would receive promotion from Rap Genius on Social media. A quid pro quo scheme meant to help Rap Genius game Google’s organic SEO ranking algorithm, creating a false amount of authority for Rap Genius and inflating its search rank. This is an example of Unethical SEO as defined by Daryn Balanco in this article. Balanco describes “Unethical SEO” as something that is not necessarily illegal, but is frowned upon and thought to be sneaky or underhanded. This perfectly describes what Rap Genius was doing. They were attempting to game the system and gain authority through backlinks they had not earned. The ethical course of action for Rap Genius would not have engaged in this scheme and instead continued to naturally earn backlinks to their website; they could have naturally accrued authority and increased their organic search result rankings. Which is something they eventually did have to do, but not before paying a grave cost.
So, it’s December 2013, this big backlinking scandal has hit the front page, and Google has to take action. Rap Genius’s actions did not reflect well on their own brand, but for Google, it was a PR nightmare. Rap Genius’s actions undermined googles business users’ confidence in their system. To penalize Rap Genius google severely reduced its search ranking across its search. This removed the result from the first page of searches it previously topped and made it so that even searching for the website’s name itself would not yield a first page result, sometimes requiring that you reach the 5th or 6th page to find the site. It was one of the harshest punishments for policy violations in the history of SEO. Eventually, the penalty was lifted, and Rap Genius was able to re-establish itself as a top SEO ranked brand, which in itself is impressive, but a story for another day. The moral of this story is that ethical practices pay off; unethical practices can be appealing as a way to get quick results, but the consequences could cost you. Had Rap Genius not taken a shortcut, it wouldn’t have lost valuable time that could have been spent gaining organic, authentic SEO. SEO takes time, and anyone who tells you different is selling something!
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