If you believe this doesn't already happen, then you and I must be using different internets. Simply by being selective in which aspects of SEO gaming they chose to address, in what order, and to what extent, they are making editorial decisions. If you're working in an industry where search results are already dominated by low-level SEO manipulation (say, maybe, music lyrics?), are you expected to stand by and let Google be the arbiter of if and when that issue is addressed?
> why not speed up the process of meeting them in the middle and focus on legit link acquisition and traffic acquisition strategies...
My guess is that will be the very likely outcome of this whole brouhaha. It would also not come as a surprise to me if this was the goal all along - getting Matt Cutts' attention is hard, until you're doing something wrong.
You seem to know a lot about SEO, definitely more than me. But it feels like you are expressing a criticism that presumes that this behavior has been happening, and has been tolerated, for some time.
Rap Genius has the quality content. The fact that they have to rely on these link building techniques to rise above the trash shows a flaw in Google's approach to ranking.
If Google makes it painful to get caught while also doing a poor job algorithmically catching people, it just incentivizes people to do "pump and dump" type sites where they use blackhat tactics to get a lyric site to the top of Google and then rinse and repeat when they get caught.
The most optimal way to make money with SEO right now is to rank quickly with blackhat SEO tactics and then when you get penalized you create a new site and start over again. This means the competitive serps are always in a state of flux as there is a revolving door of short term sites.
This hurts legit sites - they have a lot to lose by breaking Google's policies so even if they offer a better experience they'll be outranked by short term sites that don't care about Google's policies since they expect to only last half a year anyways.
> The game is the game is a poor excuse. give me $15mm and a site like Rap Genius and I'll get it outranking everybody in the space in 9 months, with only legit strategies.
Give me $20,000 and I'll outrank a "clean" $15mm budget since I won't be barred from doing the things that actually work. It might only survive 6 months, but I'll make a positive ROI and I'll repeat the process again.
I am not sure which blackhat strategies you are referring to, but I find that long term the ROI on doing legit strategies greatly outperforms blackhat strategies. (I should note that i have no idea how to cloak or hack edu sites, so I am mostly referring to buying links, and other link schemes.)
Look at a site like The Oatmeal. Look at matt inmans old dating site http://www.oneplusyou.com/q that linkbuilding strategy is amazingly effective.
More importantly, I find focusing on building referral traffic not only makes me not depend on search traffic, but it also drives up my search rankings.
"We soon ranked for competitive keywords such as "Cash Advance," "Payday Loans," and a few EDU lead generation terms. Our success led to Google receiving a number of spam complaints along with some unfavorable press in the Guardian that referred to me as genius/fiend. The consequence of all of this is that we were penalized by Google. We no longer ranked for "Free Online Dating" and other dating related keywords. In fact, we no longer even rank for very brand-specific keywords such as "JustSayHi". In short, we had been completely banned from search results.
As soon as we discovered that we had been penalized, we immediately filed a reconsideration request. Matt Cutts got involved in the case personally, but after a couple of emails, the penalty was not lifted."
Sounds familiar!
I think matt's strategy today would be more of a growth hack than a link building strategy. I think egobait still works quite well.
However if you are looking to make money and you don't have a value add to offer, it's very easy to quickly throw together a website, plaster some ads, do blackhat SEO, and very quickly make a lot of money while only working 10 hours/week since you don't have to actually worry about providing anyone anything of value (and it's not like doing blackhat SEO is that difficult to do).
Because of the above, if you are strictly looking at ROI and SEO is one of your main sources for traffic (which would be the case for a lyrics site) it makes a lot more sense to focus your efforts on SEO than it does to focus your efforts on creating an awesome website.
Edit: For whoever downvoted me, if you think I'm wrong I'd love to hear why.
Now that we have that settled, and you are looking for a new search engine, let me suggest http://www.plexisearch.com/
It uses a lot less Page Rank style rankings, we don't have to do much delisting since we can usually tell using NLP if a site is any good.
2. Gaming SEO is attractive to almost everybody. Google needs to make it so painful to get caught, that people won't bother risking it in the future. The way I see it is...even if Googles algorithms havent caught up just yet to surface the best quality content, they will eventually, why not speed up the process of meeting them in the middle and focus on legit link acquisition and traffic acquisition strategies...
3. I have no opinions about Rap Genius or their founders, I think their actions deserve a massive penalty...let them run ppc for those long tail lyric lines, I doubt those clicks cost more than a nickel. Let them clean up their act, and go through the channels to request a reinclusion in the index.
The game is the game is a poor excuse. give me $15mm and a site like Rap Genius and I'll get it outranking everybody in the space in 9 months, with only legit strategies.