Google has responded toughly when finding that the lyrics site, Rap Genius, was using SEO tricks to appear among the very first in its search results. Now the site does not appear in the listing at all.
With both companies working towards a resolution to fix the problem, the founders of Rap Genius, released a statement, which read, “We are working with Google right now to resolve this. They’ve been really great, helping us identify changes we need to make, even on Christmas. We’re working on it as fast as we can, and expect to be back on Google very soon.”
As it stands, the site has been literally banished to the sixth page of results when one looks for Rap Genius. This, no doubt, spells disaster for the site as it depends Google Search referral traffic to build its customer base and in turn, monetize the site with ads going forward.
But this was only coming since its founders have been known to be outrageous and foul-mouthed with their behavior. However, it was overshadowed by the site’s success which had moved to a prominent position in the Google Search results.
Of course, their popularity soared when they received a $15 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz in late 2012.
However, this situation all started when John Marbach found out how the site was being unscrupulous when it asked him to add a series of Justin Bieber links to his blog in exchange for tweeting links to his blog in return.
If it had worked, it would have given the site better result rankings on searches to songs from Justin Bieber’s new album.
Marbach declined and published the email on his blog and which caused Matt Cutts, in charge of Google webspam, to investigate the matter, leading to the troublesome situation that the site finds itself in now.