One would think that a new online startup company with a $15 million dollar investment from Andreessen Horowitz, would be savvy enough to understand or at least research the world of SEO, SEO companies, and the things not to do. But apparently Rap Genius, a new and well-funded tech startup, that lets people crowdsource explanations to song lyrics, took the quick and dirty route to increase its online visibility in Google, and now are paying a hefty price.

Two days before Christmas they were exposed by blogger John Marbach for their fairly dubious spammy SEO techniques which in turn triggered an investigation by Google’s search-spam guru, Matt Cutts. This subsequently led to Google imposing significant search ranking penalties on Rap Genius, their rankings plummeted, and their web traffic went into a death spiral. Within just two days of Google penalizing Rap Genius in Google’s search results, the traffic to RapGenuis.com had plummeted from 1,376,535 unique visitors down to 493,420 unique visitors (traffic measured using Quantcast Data).

A Google search for “Rap Genius”, their fairly unique business name now does not reveal their homepage in the top 100 results on Google.com and only a couple of interior pages show up at around search result 63 on page 6.

Earlier in December this search would have shown their homepage to be at the top of page one of Google’s search results. And despite what some reporters in the media think, not even showing up for your most basic “branded” search, which is your business name, is really a big deal. It indicates a conscious effort by Google to manually penalize them and portends that their “non-branded” search traffic will also all but dry up. All of this adds up to the devastating decrease in web traffic to RapGenius.com that is already being seen.

Essentially the technique that Rap Genius and/or their hired SEO company used, was setting up a tit for tat linking scheme disguised as an “affiliate” program to alter their rankings on Google. Their end goal was to create a massive network of different sites all linking back to RapGenius.com. Bloggers were essentially incentivized to create hotlinks on their own blog websites that pointed back to RapGenius.com. Backlinks  have long been cherished within SEO strategies, however Google and some of the other search engines have taken recent steps to de-emphasize the importance of backlinks and to aggressively penalize “link farms” and backlinks that were not “organically” obtained.

John Marbach, the initial blogger to expose this scam, was himself offered “MASSIVE traffic” and the chance to “bloooowwwww up!” for posting links with Justin Bieber song titles and the word “lyrics” as anchor text on his own blog and which would link back to the RapGenius.com website. Below is the email that he received from a Rap Genius representative.

Below is an example of one of the Rap Genius backlinks implemented on a blogger site that decided to take the Rap Genius offer. This one at least tried to find some context to the actual content of the blog post itself. But many of these lyrical code widgets or text links, which all point back to RapGenius.com webpages, were placed on sites and within content that had nothing to do with music lyrics and were thus obviously spammy in nature.

This is exactly the type of SEO scheme Google had warned about earlier this year and is what their Panda update has tried to combat. Google even took the unprecedented step of recommending to many directory and PR / News sites that any backlink that was not organically obtained should be coded as either a nofollow link or be labeled as a paid or advertorial link.

In response to Google’s smackdown, Rap Genius executives have taken to the interwebs and have put out a sort of apology non-apology, “We effed up, other lyrics sites are almost definitely doing worse stuff, and we’ll stop.”

Behind the scenes Rap Genius is apparently working with Google to get their site and SEO techniques cleaned up in an effort to get some of their rankings reinstated. It will be interesting to see how Google responds, because as other bloggers  have noted, this isn’t the first time their spammy SEO tactics have been called out. However, this is the first time the tech press and now mainstream media have jumped on their newest attempt to outwit Google and game Google’s search algorithm.

As Rap Genius has hopefully learned, taking SEO shortcuts, using unscrupulous SEO companies, and trying to spam Google’s search algorithm for short-term gains will ultimately prove very costly as evidenced by Google’s decisive and devastating response.

Eric SEO and SEM