Dec 25th 2013, 18:08, by Josh Constine
Google hit back hard today after it learned lyrics site Rap Genius had been using dubious SEO tricks to attain top spots in search results. Now RapGenius.com doesn’t appear on the first page of results for a search of “Rap Genius”, and popular queries like “Jay-Z Holy Grail Lyrics” don’t bring up the startup like they used to. The reduced traffic could seriously hurt the well-funded startup.
Founded in 2009, Rap Genius is a lyrics and text annotation site. It lets users provide their own explanations for song lyrics, religious texts, legal documents, images, and more that other users see when they hover over snippets of text hosted on the site. The startup lept into the limelight when it received a massive $15 million investment led by Andreessen Horowitz in late 2012.
Known for their foul-mouths and outrageous behavior, the Rap Genius founders had been riding high over the last year as their site climbed into prominent and lucrative slots in Google search results.
But earlier this week, Rap Genius invited bloggers to join its “Rap Genius Blog Affiliate” program. John Marbach, the founder of email filtering startup Glider, emailed in asking for details, and Rap Genius offerered to tweet links to his blog in exchange for him placing a series of links to Rap Genius’ Justin Bieber lyrics on his blog. The links were designed to trick Google into giving Rap Genius better result rankings on searches for lyrics to songs from Bieber’s new album — sure to a be popular searches this season.
Marbach then revealed Rap Genius’ unscrupulous tactics by publishing the email it sent him in a widely read blog post, prompting Google’s webspam czar Matt Cutts to announce “We’re investigating this now” on Hacker News. Rap Genius apologized in an open letter to Google, asking for the enter lyrics site category to be examined, implying shady SEO tactics were common amongst its competitors.
That apology doesn’t seem to have gotten it very far, as Google this morning practically swept Rap Genius out of its search results. Previously, Rap Genius was appearing at the top or close to the top of search results for queries of popular rap songs and the word “lyrics”, for example “Kanye West Flashing Lights Lyrics“. It would even sometime appear high in simple searches for artist and song names.
Now, you won’t find Rap Genius for that query until the fifth page of results, likely farther than anyone would look. For evidence how deep the punshment goes, adding “Rap Genius” to the end of that query actually makes Rap Genius appear even further down the results on the sixth page.
And just to make sure it was clear, Google banished RapGenius.com to the bottom of the sixth page of results of searches for “Rap Genius”.
Becoming practically unsearchable could be huge it to Rap Genius’ business, which depends on Google search referral traffic. Without that traffic, it will be much harder to grow its user base, collect new annotations, and potentially monetize with ads down the road.
Whether Google’s reaction was too tough is a matter of opinion. Gaming search results with spammy SEO tactics is certainly deplorable, but wiping Rap Genius off of top result pages for queries that include its own name is pretty harsh. Whether they deserve it or should get a lighter punishment depends on your perspective regarding the sanctity of Google search results. We’re awaiting a response from the Rap Genius founders, and have been promised a statement shortly.
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