Lyrics Site Plummets In Google Rankings

Popular lyrics and annotation site Rap Genius has landed in hot water with Google over its search-engine optimization strategies and for the time being at least, it doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot the company can do to get its business back on track.

Whereas a few days ago, any Google search for pretty much any rap lyric or track title would deliver Rap Genius as the first result, searching for “Rap Genius” today doesn’t even deliver the site’s homepage until the fifth page of Google results. This is a huge problem for a site that depends almost exclusively on Google-delivered web traffic to pay the bills.

The site’s founders have posted a lengthy letter admitting to and apologizing for their SEO techniques, but the site is likely to remain banished from Google search results for around thirty to sixty days.

“The other strategy we employ on a much smaller scale (the subject of recent Hacker News controversy) is to find blogs whose content we think our followers will enjoy and ask them to link pages on Rap Genius that are relevant to their posts. We actually thought we had set this up to be compliant with Google’s linking policy in its Terms of Service, but we messed up and want to explain how,” Rap Genius’ founders posted in a note on the site. “Though any links to our tracks that our fans put on their pages were editorially placed or vouched for by them, in some instances we have fallen short in terms of making sure that the links people post are natural.”

Rap Genius’ controversial SEO strategies first began to gain prominence through a post on the Hacker News linkboard. A Google engineer in charge of webspam took notice and posted that the company would look into it. According to The Verge, Rap Genius’ Google standing began to plummet shortly thereafter.