In the continuing saga of big companies implementing SEO strategies that get them a spanking, Rap Genius has had its SERP positions wiped out by Google.
Rap Genius is a lyrics site that allows its users to comment on lyrics, explaining and analyzing their meaning. The lyrics industry is a cutthroat niche, with a large number of sites fighting it out for the top SERP positions. Among its competitors, Rap Genius is a standout for the quality of the site and the insightful commentaries, but apparently the company’s owners decided that wasn’t good enough, and implemented a link building strategy that even a neophyte SEO could have told them wasn’t wise.
The story was originally broken by John Marbach, who posted a copy of an email he received from Rap Genius, which offered to send out a tweet of Marbach’s choosing on the RG Twitter account in exchange for the posting of a snippet of HTML that contained a list of links with keyword anchor text for a set of lyrics.
In a Hacker News thread on the subject, everyone’s favorite web spam fighter Matt Cutts posted a comment saying that Google were aware of the issue. Soon after, Google applied a penalty to the Rap Genius domain that pushed all of their results, even for queries containing the Rap Genius brand name, down into the nether regions of the SERPS — sixth page and lower — where no one ever ventures.
Naturally, the result was a swift decline in traffic for RG, which relies almost entirely on Google for traffic.
Rap Genius is — or was — an enormously popular site among its demographic, so Google saw considerable pushback from users complaining that the search engine giant was abusing its power and treating RG unfairly. Many users made the point that, in spite of the shady SEO tactics, which are clearly against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, the site is in fact the best lyrics site out there, and depriving its users of access from the SERPs does more harm than good.
But as Danny Sullivan points out on Search Engine Land, the penalizing of sites involved in setting up link schemes happens almost every day. It’s rare for the site to be quite so prominent, but cleaning like this happens all the time. It’s how Google manages to keep its results free of the spam that crippled its early competitors.
It’s interesting to note that Rap Genius wasn’t caught by Google, but was exposed by the “whistle blowing” of a blogger, so it’s anyone’s guess how long it would have taken Google to act had they not had the prompting of the Internet storm that blew up around that article.
While it’s true that Google shuts down link schemes all the time, their ability to spot them may not be all that speedy, which means that web site owners are in a position of having to choose: can they reap the benefits of their link scheming before Google catches them? The Rap Genius guys were unlucky, but it’s not at all certain that everyone gets caught so quickly.