It’s always interesting to find out how different sites compared to each other and themselves year to year. Did they do better, did they do worse, or did they simply stay about the same in their rankings?
Marcus Tober, who hails from Search Metrics, did a deep dive for the winners and losers in Google search results, and compared what was found when comparing 2014 to 2013. According to what he found, it seems that lyrics sites took a major hit.
- elyrics.net saw a 92% decrease in search visibility
- lyricsmode.com saw a 60% decrease in search visibility
- sing365.com saw a 60% decrease in search visibility
- lyricsfreak.com saw a 59% decrease in search visibility
- metrolyrics.com saw a 12% decrease in search visibility
It seems that the only light side of lyric sites that saw any sort of positive increase in rankings was azlyrics.com. It experienced a 24% increase.
The issues with lyric sites seemed to have all started when Rap Genius was penalized for link schemes back at the end of December of 2013. Even though Rap Genius came back in the search results only ten days later, it could be that after that incident, Google decided to dive into the lyrics niche and have a more in depth look at them.
About a year after the Rap Genius incident, Google decided to start showing full lyrics in the search results in late December 2014. Will there be any impact on traffic and visibility of these lyric sites in the Google search results? We’ll have to wait and see.
Despite the massive hit these sites have taken over the last year, it’s a good thing to note that when Search Metrics took a look at the data from these sites, they were looking at keyword ranking by site. What needs to be kept in mind is that traffic doesn’t have an exact relation to the ranking of specific keywords. There could still be a high amount of traffic flowing to these sites, due to social, email and direct traffic. Search Metrics only focused on the search ranking of Google itself.