Music Times reported last week that web service Rap Genius had been called out for using sketchy methods of attracting web users to its site. Google brought down the iron fist of the law and bumped the site back to at least page two of any web search, and the results have been traumatic thus far for the hip-hop lyric site. Analytics site Quantcast revealed that between December 24 and 25-the dates in which the punishment began-visits to the site dropped from nearly 1.5 million to 300,000...a nearly 80 percent drop off.
John Marbach, a writer for SearchEngineLand.com, called out the site for reaching out to amateur bloggers to carry out a "link scheme" in order to build RapGeniuses' hits. The site would advertise to bloggers that if they included links to rapgenius.com that included Justin Bieber lyrics, Rap Genius would then it turn tweet a link to that blogger's site. The blogger would inevitably see a rise in visits thanks to the tweet, and Bieber's popularity would lead those viewers to follow the links to Rap Genius.
The problem is that Google doesn't allow such scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours schemes, and punishes sites that take part in them. Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, said on Thursday that Rap Genius will automatically be relegated to the second page of search results, regardless of the search terms. As of this morning, if you search "Rap Genius" on the search engine, links to the service's Twitter and Facebook pages will come up, however links to the site itself don't show up until page two.
RapGenius at least had the courtesy to admit to wrongdoing ("we effed up"), and promised to quit the scheme. However, they encouraged Google to look into other sites that they claimed "are almost definitely doing worse stuff."
It doesn't look like sincere apologies were enough to ease Google's wrath. Moral: Don't screw around with Google.
