Google Hits Rap Genius With A Spam Penalty Resulting in 80% Traffic Loss
Lyrics site Rap Genius
was penalized by Google just before Christmas after being outed for a black-hat
link building scheme. Rap Genius was looking for bloggers to publish links with
keyword rich anchor text in exchange for tweeting out a link to the bloggers’
websites.
Despite the founders
issuing a public apology to Google they were still hit with a manual penalty
for violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by trying to artificially boost
their rankings.
Rap Genius’ penalty
buried every one of their pages deep beyond the first page of Google’s search
results, no matter what keyword was being searched. Even searching for the name
“Rap Genius” won’t bring up their domain on the first page, just their Twitter
and Facebook accounts.
Needless to say, this
has had a profound impact on their search traffic. Quantcast shows nearly an 80% drop since the spam
penalty went into effect:
The founders of Rap Genius claimed they will
stop the link scheme and suggested other lyrics sites are doing worse things:
"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."
There’s no word on if Google has any intention
to lift the penalty, or if they will be looking into the alleged techniques
being used by other sites. One thing is for sure: follow Google’s Webmaster
Guidelines or they will take necessary action!
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