Hi guys, First post and my curiosity is peaking: Lyrics websites. They have a whole tonne of duplicate content since song lyrics can only be twisted so much. How do search engines see and treat these sites? Have they figured a way to not penalize these platform or is it "first post - only one alive"? I personally have preferences when it comes to lyrics sites. I have no clue what their names are but there have been times when I got on a lyrics site and left it for a different one that felt more authoritative.
I've wondered about that too. I suspect these factors come into play age of the site size of the site (general but few songs? niche but complete list?) speed at which the site gets new content up - new song comes out, do they have the lyrics up first, or 2 weeks later? internal linking structure - use of categories, tags etc in bound links from relevant sites out bound links to relevant sites
speed at which the site gets new content up - new song comes out, do they have the lyrics up first, or 2 weeks later? Veeery interesting point... Do you think Google can connect the release of new Lady Gaga song and the first Lyrics site to post the text? Maybe even use it to assess the site's ranking?
They will be able to detect when they first see the lyrics online - and anyone after that is a "duplicate" so the race to be first will be fierce.
If it is all about publishing the lyrics first, then we should see one and only one lyrics for every song in SERPs, because the first site that published the lyrics will be indexed and others simply won't. But this is not the case, there are tons of sites and these rank pretty well. My viewpoint: Lyrics are copyrighted. Legal lyric sites rank better and higher. Secondly and most importantly, sites that publish unique fresh content a lot rank better. This is what exactly happens with lyric sites. They just don't publish lyrics all the times instead these are supported by unique content. So this makes the content on a lyrics sites quite unique. My two cents.
You're right, it's just one factor in giving dominance to a site. If you search for lyrics on a variety of songs you'll see the same sites pop up every time - work out their formula and you'll know if there is any point in competing.
The more authoritative website will outrank the first site to publish the content. The main benefit in breaking news and the like first from a SEO perspective is that it tends to attract more links.