Rap Genius, a website dedicated to the annotation and interpretation of lyrics has been penalized by Google for SEO spam tactics. The website was caught trying to game Google to get higher search rankings.
At the time of writing this post, the website RapGenius.com is on the fifth page of Google search results for the term "rap genius." At the time of reporting, the website had a U.S. rank of 94 on Quantcast, drawing over 13 million U.S. unique visitors every month. The sharp drop in traffic on the Quantcast chart shows clearly that Rap Genius was penalized by Google on Christmas Day.
The controversy started with an article by Thiel Fellow John Marbach, who described the Rap Genius' little-known affiliate program. The program, that was advertised on their Facebook fan page, required bloggers to add tagged links of Rap Genius' Justin Bieber pages at the bottom of any post. In return, Rap Genius would promote the post on their social media.
The post trended on the Hacker News linkboard, and subsequently drew the attention of Google News engineer Matt Cutts, who is in charge of monitoring web spam. He commented, "we're looking into it" and shortly the results were evident.
After getting caught, the founders of Rap Genius apologized but also noted that it was not a widespread practice and it should not take long to remove the links.
"[We'll] discourage things like this in the future. We are also getting in touch with the relevant site owners individually to request that they remove any such links. Just to be clear, this is an not a widespread practice, and it should not be too difficult to stamp out," read the open letter to Google from Rap Genius.
However, they also tried to deflect the blame by saying other similar lyric sites were doing worse. "We effed up, other lyrics sites are almost definitely doing worse stuff, and we'll stop. We'd love for Google to take a closer look at the whole lyrics search landscape and see whether it can make changes that would improve lyric search results," they wrote. However, it doesn't make Rap Genius any less guilty, does it?
For the founders, now the focus is going to be 100 percent on community annotation. In an email to TechCrunch, Ilan Zechory, co-founder of Rap Genius wrote :
"We messed up here, which is why starting today we are 100% focused on the SEO strategy that has gotten us the best results: building an amazing product and community. It's also the strategy we execute most effectively - we believe Rap Genius provides the highest quality lyric search results, and it's not even close. For example, check out Rap Genius' annotated edition of Justin Bieber's "Confident" - as of today 67 different fans have contributed annotations!
"Our goal is to bring about a world where everyone searching for lyrics gets a rich, interactive, knowledge filled experience, rather than a flat spammy one," Zechory wrote.
Perhaps, but gaming Google search results isn't the way to go about doing it.
