Rap Genius Caught Gaming Google

Rap Genius is a lyrics website that annotates lyrics, usually line for line. The site stands out amongst the myriads of lyrics site and is a site I’ve often browse whenever curiosity got to me about a particular lyric line. Despite it’s uniqueness, Rap Genius felt they needed a bit more help to maintain their position in Google rankings. According to “Rap Genius plummets in Google results, apologizes for spammy practices” by Russell Brandom of TheVerge.com, Rap Genius was caught gaming Google for a high rank – for which Google responded by dropping the site a few pages from rank 1. The article quickly summarizes the site’s SEO scheme:

“The program asked bloggers to add tagged links to Rap Genius’s Justin Bieber pages to the bottom of a given post. In exchange, the founders promised to use their Twitter and Facebook presence to promote the post, in turn boosting their own Google SEO traffic”

The exposure of this program received enough attention to catch the eye of Matt Cutts, “a Google engineer in charge of webspam”. From there, Rap Genius dropped in rank.

Rap Genius responded to the punishment with an “Open Letter to Google About Rap Genius SEO”. In a nutshell, this “open letter” claims the site uses a compliant main SEO strategy; their “ other strategy [employed] on a much smaller scale” was compliant also but the site “messed up”. The letter quotes specific Google guidelines, state after every guideline “we didn’t do this”, and then gives an explanation of the specific practice that did go against the guideline. The letter is riddled with blatant finger pointing at other lyric sites – the P.S. is a list of other “competitors” that also have “suspicious backlinks” and an elementary grid listing the ways these competitors are exhibiting the same behavior.

This letter is like a child that says they didn’t do anything wrong but admits they may have partially slightly done something kind of wrong; so, if they have to get in trouble, every one else should too. Rap Genius is correct – they are not the only ones using backlinks and other shady SEO schemes. However, to publicly respond to Google by pointing out the obvious suspects is childish and does nothing to amend their web brand. At least the site apologized and stated they will (from now on) comply with Google guidelines.