Report: 2014 Was A Bad Year For Lyrics Sites In Google

Marcus Tober from Search Metrics has done a deep dive winners and losers in the Google search results, comparing 2014 to 2013. One of the big trends we see in his report is that lyrics sites took a big hit.

• elyrics.net saw a negative 92% drop in search visibility
• lyricsmode.com saw a negative 60
• sing365.com saw a negative 60 drop in search visibility
• lyricsfreak.com saw a negative 59 drop in search visibility
• metrolyrics.com saw a negative 12 drop in search visibility

Only one lyrics site saw an increase in visibility from Google’s search results, that is azlyrics.com with a 24% lift.

We saw at the end of December 2013, Rap Genius was penalized for link schemes but then saw themselves back in the search results ten days later. Maybe that manual action had Google’s engineers take a deeper look at the lyrics niche.

One thing, you’d probably see a deeper impact on these lyrics sites in 2015. Google in late December 2014, began showing full lyrics in the search results, which can directly impact the traffic and visibility of these lyrics sites in the Google search results.

It is important to note, SearchMetrics data looks at keyword ranking by site. So traffic isn’t an exact relation to the ranking of specific keywords. These sites may have a lot of traffic from social, email and direct traffic.