is the day in search marketing history: January 4,

Rap Genius, a lyrics website, was penalized 10 days ago for creating “unnatural links”.

Google confirmed that it was investigating Rap Genius’ “affiliate program”. This program allowed Rap Genius to create unnatural links to their website. Google had already penalized Rap Genius over link schemes the day before.

If you search Google for “rap genius”, you won’t find rapgenius.com at Page 1. But, they did provide links to their Twitter page, Facebook page, Wikipedia profile, and stories about them being punished by Google.

The penalty resulted in a 92% decrease in search visibility.

Said Rap Genius:

We gave up. Other lyrics sites do worse stuff than us, so we will stop. We would love Google to look at all lyrics search landscapes and make any changes that could improve lyric search results.


– Rap Genius

Rap Genius back in Google after 10 days Penalty, ranks for its name but what about lyrics?

This day, too


Bing Webmaster tools adds crawl requests, crawl mistakes & index pages to the performance report

2021 All of the new crawling and indexing information, which were all not directly related to search results performance in Microsoft Bing, are now available in the search performance report.


Google launches the Question Hub for U.S. Publishers

2021: Google created Question Hub in areas where it found that its search index did not contain enough content to answer users’ queries. (On December 15, 2022, Google declared that it would be closing Question Hub.


Video by Anthony Church about conversion tracking and SEO

2021 This episode of Barry Schwartz’s vlog series features Church talking about two main topics: conversion tracking, and where SEOs should be focusing.


Google purchases Superpod’s expert community, ‘answer engine’ and Superpod for $60 Million

2019:Superpod matched audience questions with expert answers on a wide range of topics. Early reports suggested that Superpod’s founders would be used to improve Google Assistant.


DuckDuckGo surpassed 9 billion searches in 2018 and is growing

2019 In comparison to 2016, they did 4 Billion searches. As of October 2018, DuckDuckGo had reported that they were able to reach 30,000,000 queries per day.


Google My Business Dashboard showing video upload section for certain business owners

2018 Google appeared to be testing whether business owners can upload videos to local listings in the Google My Business dashboard.


According to analyst firm , Search marketing will experience a ‘late-stage revival’

2018: Brand safety, privacy, and other factors will make paid search more appealing to marketers in the future, according To Forrester Research.


Google’s new iOS app pulls in YouTube video, menus and more

2017: Users can now view YouTube videos directly in their feeds, see hotel booking information and rates in search results, and open restaurant menus instantly from search results.

2016, AOL’s mobile, web and tablet search were powered by Bing. AOL provides paid search ads as well as algorithmic organic results to its properties around the world.


DuckDuckGo Ends 2015 on a High Note: 12M Searches in One Day

2016 By the end of 2016, the privacy search engine had performed more than 10,000,000 searches per day.


Authors Guild Appeals Lower Court Decision Backing Google’s Book Digitizing Project

2016 The issue was whether Google’s project violates copyrights of some millions of scanned books or if it has a valid exception for “fair use”.


Blekko Launches New Tablet Search Engine “izik”

2013:Izik was created to provide a tablet-friendly search interface. Comparable to Google, izik presented more information than Google and made it visually more accessible.


Official: Scott Thompson, PayPal President, is the New Yahoo CEO

2012: Thompson initially was seen as a positive hire, despite concerns over his lack of experience in digital advertising. Thompson resigned as CEO May 2012 after a turbulent few months.


Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” is Making It Worse

2012: Santorum’s problem in ranking high for searches on his last name only was that he did not maintain a dedicated website about him, an independent site where people who wanted to learn more about Rick Santorum could find out more.


Google’s Marrisa Maier discusses a new role, LBS and Groupon

2011 Mayer is no longer involved in search. Mayer took on new responsibilities including Google Maps, local product, and some of the company’s mobile products.


Google Working on NFC-Based Mobile Payment Service. Report

2011. Google planned to launch a mobile payment service, which would let users pay for common goods or services by tapping their phones. This was Google Wallet which launched in September 2011.


Scores First In-Car Google Deal with Toyota

2011: Bing Mobile (with Bing Maps), was Toyota Entune’s feature app. It allowed drivers to access Bing search results through the dashboard’s touch screen, or via Bing Mobile’s voice search capabilities.


Facebook’s Goldman Investment An Inflation Delaying Strategy?

2011 Was Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) just around the corner? Or was this an investment that delayed the IPO by a year? (Spoiler alert! Facebook’s initial public offering was in 2012.


Google Will Surprise You With an Android Tablet Tomorrow!

2010: Spoiler: no. Liveblogging: The Google Nexus One Phone Launch.

2010 Google animated Doodle. The Doodle shows the Apple falling off the Google logo, and dropping to the bottom of the search box.


Fear Explains Unrational B2B Purchase Behavior

2010: buying B2B is not rational. It is driven by emotions.


Google Timeline Experiment Seen in Main Search Results

2009 By clicking the “More timeline” link in the main search results, you will be taken to a page that contains more historical data about your query. This was said to have been generated by Google’s News Archive search service.


Nathan Stoll is a long-serving Google News Product Manager. He leaves Google

2008 He would later co-found Aardvark (help engine), which was later purchased by Google in February 2010,.


Google Takes NASA To Watch Meteor Shower

2008: This was when NASA scientists used a plane that belonged to Google’s founders in order to view a meteor shower.


Kevin Fox joins a new start-up company as a User Experience Expert at Google.

2008: Fox was responsible for designing Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Reader 2.0. He also joined a small startup called FriendFeed which was eventually acquired by Facebook in August 2009.


What Time is It? Do not use Google (At least in Argentina)

2008: The citizens of the capital of Argentina set forward their clocks – but Google did not.


Truveo Index Hits 100 Million Videos

2008 The company stated that its search index has grown from a base with just 5,000,000 videos at the August 2007 relaunch.

2007 It displayed how you interacted with your Google Reader feeds.


Google Calendar Set To Pass Yahoo Calendar

2007 – Google Calendar saw a 333% increase in market share between June 2006 & December 2006. It’s hard to believe that it hasn’t happened since then.


Amazon Launches Answers Services

2007: These were prompt efforts by Amazon, LinkedIn after Google dropped its Answers product


YouTube Shuts Down in Brazil

2007: Why? YouTube failed to stop celebrity sex videos from being uploaded time after time


Google Removes “Tips” Feature After Recent Blog Controversy

2007 A Google search on [calendar] or [blog] did not bring up the Google Tips at all. Background: Fury over Google’s Self Promotion and Wishing For Perspective.

Search Marketing Expo ( , SMX).

Past contributions by Search Engine Land’s Subject matter Experts (SMEs).

These columns represent a snapshot of time. They have not been updated since publication, except where noted. These articles do not reflect Search Engine Land’s views.

Search Marketing History

The post January 4 was first published on Search Engine Land.

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