Lyrics annotation website Rap Genius was penalized by Google in December last year for engaging in SEO spam tactics but the site is now back in the search rankings with a vengeance.
For ten days after it was caught and penalized by Google for gaming search results, RapGenius.com fell to the sixth page of the search results for the term "Rap Genius". Web traffic analytics Quantcast confirmed the massive decline in traffic, reporting that from 650,000 visitors a day, Rap Genius managed to get less than 143,000 visitors a day during its exile. The website, however, is finally back in the arms of Google.
In a blog post published Saturday, the founders of Rap Genius announced that the site is back on Google. "It takes a few days for things to return to normal, but we're officially back," reads the blog post. "First of all, we owe a big thanks to Google for being fair and transparent and allowing us back onto their results pages. We overstepped, and we deserved to get smacked."
The blog post also provided details on what angered Google in the first place: the site's blog affiliate program where bloggers were encouraged to publish links to Rap Genius on their site in exchange for their post getting promoted on social media, a practice known as "growth hacking". "It was really bad: A lazy and likely ineffective 'strategy,' so over-the-top in its obviousness that it was practically begging for a response from Google," Rap Genius said of the strategy in its blog post.
The company also shared how it approached the problem to be freed from Google's penalty. The site had to identify and weed out "unnatural links". This involved contacting bloggers and webmasters to get the spammy links removed and using Google's disavowal tool.
Rap Genius also says it might help those whose websites were removed from Google by sharing how it managed to get back to the top of search results. "We hope this gives some insight into how Rap Genius did SEO and what went on behind the scenes while we were exiled from Google. Also, if you find your website removed from Google, we hope you find our process and tools helpful for getting back."
