Guess it thought it is simply a case of “everybody is doing it so I guess I can’t get away with it.” Unfortunately, it got caught.
Rap Genius attempted to boost its search standing by asking blogs on Facebook to insert links to its site in return for traffic-driving tweets. Specifically this involved getting bloggers to insert backlinks to Rap Genius’ lyrics for the new Justin Bieber album, “Journals.” In exchange, Rap Genius promised to Tweet a link to the blog post containing the links.
Credits: http://jmarbach.com/
John Marbach replied to the request and exposed the deal. This stirred debate and comments across the Web, and recalled previous incidents of Google penalizing sites for what it considers to be “gaming” of its search algorithm.
As John Marbach reports, “RapGenius makes its business off music lyrics. Millions of people search the lyrics to their favorite songs daily. RapGenius wants to be the first result that people click on when people are searching for any lyric.”
“Their business depends on their search engine ranking position (SERP’s) on Google. Hyperlinks connect the web and determine SERP’s. Thus, the most powerful weapon RapGenius can deploy is a series of powerful hyperlinks.”
Unfortunately when Google investigated this act, it blacklisted the site as it said this was against its policy for promotion through linking. See the effect below as measured on Quantcast. It changed how RapGenius would show up in its search results. According to Wall Street Journal, “On Christmas day, RapGenius’s home page did not appear until the sixth page of results to the search “rapgenius.””
Rap Genius has since apologized for the scheme, while at the same time pointing the finger at rival lyrics sites, saying :
“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.”
How long will this penalty last? According to Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Search Engine Land on Wall Street Journal, there are two possibilities.
Google manually makes the offender appear lower in search rankings for a specified period, often 90 days, but sometimes as long as a year.
Google changes its search algorithm to recognize and penalize types of websites, such as sites that scrape news stories from other sites and republish them without any original content. These sites would appear lower in rankings unless Google changes its algorithm again, or the sites changes their practices.
